The connection between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary.

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.

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.

Strange where our passions carry us, floggingly pursue us, forcing upon us unwanted dreams, unwelcome destinies.

Throughout it all, you are still, always, you: beautiful and bruised, known and unknowable. And isn't that - just you - enough?

It's amazing what happens when you stick yourself in a place and let things take their more or less natural course.

I think the presidency is much too serious a thing to just play politics with.

You see a lot of sides of people on a movie set because it can be really taxing and to kind of go through all that together - you really get to know someone.

Look around when you have got your first mushroom or made your first discovery: they grow in clusters.

I'm the depresso guy on holidays.

As you say, the way string theory requires all these extra dimensions and this comes from certain consistency requirements about how string should behave and so on.

Men and women are very different athletes, and frankly, I didn't want to deal with the male potential.

I guess I am a bit of a traditionalist.