Ferdinand De Saussure

A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas...

Linguistics will have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from those restricted to one branch of languages or another.

Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.

Any psychology of sign systems will be part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively social; it will involve the same psychology as is applicable in the case of languages.

Written forms obscure our view of language. They are not so much a garment as a disguise.

Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.

Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.

Whitney wanted to eradicate the idea that in the case of a language we are dealing with a natural faculty; in fact, social institutions stand opposed to natural institutions.

Language furnishes the best proof that a law accepted by a community is a thing that is tolerated and not a rule to which all freely consent.

Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law

The very special place that a language occupies among institutions is undeniable, but there is much more to be said-, a comparison would tend rather to bring out the differences.

It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent.

Outside speech, the association that is made in the memory between words having something in common creates different groups, series, families, within which very diverse relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are associative relations.

Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs, but these signs do not directly evoke things.