"Now, how do we experience the fact of language? Language is not a wholly individualized human reality; no one invents language. Its sources of diffusion and evolution are not individualized; and yet, what is more human than language? Man is human because he speaks: one the one hand, language exists only because each man speaks; but language also exists as an institution within which we are born and die. Is this not a sign that Man is not wholly individuated, but is both individual and collective?"
- Paul Ricoeur, The Image of God and the Epic of Man