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.

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.

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.

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

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

In fact, from then on scholars engaged in a kind of game of comparing different Indo-European languages with one another, and eventually they could not fail to wonder what exactly these connections showed, and how they should be interpreted in concrete terms.

Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.