Ferdinand de Saussure Quotes

In other words, the man who is born into existence deals first with language; this is a given. He is even caught in it before his birth.

We often think that language mirrors the world in which we live, and I find that's not true. The language actually makes the world in which we live. Language is not - I mean, things don't have any mutable value by themselves; we ascribe them a value.

Language always pre-exists us: it is always already 'in place', waiting to assign us our places within it.

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.

Language is a social art.

Homosexuality is genetically hardwired but race and gender are only ideas. OK. Just trying to keep up.

Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.

Language is generated by the intellect and generates the intellect.

Man does not exist prior to language, either as a species or as an individual.

It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is. Language disguises thought.

It is impossible to disassociate language from science...To call forth a concept, a word is needed.

By a generative grammar I mean simply a system of rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences. Obviously, every speaker of a language has mastered and internalized a generative grammar that expresses his knowledge of his language. This is not to say that he is aware of the rules of the grammar or even that he can become aware of them, or that his statements about his intuitive knowledge of the language are necessarily accurate.

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

She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.

To say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth, that sentences are elements of human languages, and that languages are human creations.~ The suggestion that truth~ is out there is a legacy of an age in which the world was seen as the creation of a being who had a language his own.

Cultures are virtual realities made of language.

I have never said, as is sometimes believed, or even suggested that lower-class children should not learn the so-called educated norm of the Portuguese language of Brazil. What I have said is that the problems of language always involve ideological questions and, along with them, questions of power.

If you know only one language, you're a prisoner, stuck in the tyranny of that one language.

She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells.

Every language having a structure, by the very nature of language, reflects in its own structure that of the world as assumed by those who evolved the language. In other words, we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use.

Learning a language represents training in the delusions of that language.

Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

The unconscious is structured like a language.

I love language. It doesn't bother me that its effects are partial. To me that is very sanity-producing. It would be weird if the effects of language were more than partial, if your whole life existed within your texts. That would be much scarier to me than language being an inadequate tool to represent.

He who does not know foreign languages does not know anything about his own.