Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.

Human beings do not wish to be modest; they want to be as expressive - that is, as immodest - as fear allows; fashion helps them solve that paradoxical problem.

A logical analysis of reflexive usages in French shows, however, that this simplicity is an illusion and that, so far from helping the foreigner, it is more calculated to bother him.

Cultural anthropology is not valuable because it uncovers the archaic in the psychological sense. It is valuable because it is constantly rediscovering the normal.

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality.

We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.

English, once accepted as an international language, is no more secure than French has proved to be as the one and only accepted language of diplomacy or as Latin has proved to be as the international language of science.