I’m almost never serious, and I’m always too serious. Too deep, too shallow. Too sensitive, too cold hearted. I’m like a collection of paradoxes.

The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

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.

The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.

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.

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.

Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula.

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

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

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

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.

The moment to make your dreams come true is day before tomorrow, same time, called NOW.

It's only a two-day hike. But it lasts a lifetime.

And seemingly as winter has become spring, confusion has become insight.

It would be difficult to dispel ignorance unless there is freedom to pursue the truth unfettered by fear.

I don't do things lightly, I don't take a job then just phone it in, I've never done that.

Did you ever know that you're my hero, you're everything I wish I could be. I could fly higher than an eagle with you as the wind beneath my wings.

Players who have more great games than other players are the great players.

"Weenie" was definitely a word we used at Yale back then. But I'm not sure you were one, Larry [Kramer]. Also, you were going by a different name.

Every time I "get with the program"... somebody changes the channel.

What has miserable, inefficient Mexico...to do with the great mission of peopling the New World with a noble race?