Quotes from Ferdinand de Saussure

It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.

A language presupposes that all the individual users possess the organs.

It is only since linguistics has become more aware of its object of study, i.e. perceives the whole extent of it, that it is evident that this science can make a contribution to a range of studies that will be of interest to almost anyone.

Within speech, words are subject to a kind of relation that is independent of the first and based on their linkage: these are syntagmatic relations, of which I have spoken.

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

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.