The expression 'sound laws' is inappropriate in still another respect. Although, following general practice, I use the term here exclusively in the sense of laws of sound change, it can be applied with equal, or even greater justification to the laws of sound structure. (p. 42)
- Schuchardt (1972)

The theory of the unexceptionability of sound laws, which, if it did not originate with August Schleicher, certainly has been proclaimed in his spirit, pokes its head out of that period into our own day like an ancient statue. Our day ascribes to linguistics the character of an historical science. It does not view language as natural organism, but as a social product. (p. 64)
- Schuchardt (1972)

I have already stated that those sound laws that analogy can disrupt are psychologically conditioned. (p. 45)
- Schuchardt (1972)

In the proposition “the sound laws operate without exception”, both the subject and the predicate evoke weighty doubts […] This subsumption of sound laws under natural laws, so proudly presented in the beginning, was given up by the leaders in the neogrammarian school later on […] The unexceptionability of sound laws is made untenable by the same set of facts that refutes the similarity of these laws to natural laws. (p. 42)
- Schuchardt (1972)

Within temporal limits that can be determined only after the fact, a sound law is carried to completion within the entire expanse of the speech community and throughout the entire extent of the speech material. (p. 53)
- Schuchardt (1972)

As far as I am concerned, the doctrine of the unexceptionability of sound laws is nothing but a hindrance to the further development of science in the sense of the law of causality. The sound laws are elevated to such heights that the desire for transcending them is far weaker than if they had only the value of great regularities. And yet in any case they are only empirical laws and […] these laws must be transformed into causal laws. (p. 63)
- Schuchardt (1972)

What meaning do all […] the thousands of sound laws have as long as they remain isolated, as long as they are not absorbed into higher relationships? They serve in part, and only in an auxiliary function, for the clarification of the migrations of peoples and cultural relationships. But first they must be assimilated within the science itself. We must learn to find the general rule in the specific detail. (p. 66)
- Schuchardt (1972)

When a natural scientist hears for the first time about the unexceptionability of sound laws, he probably imagines sound laws that apply at all places and at all times […] If that naive scientist is told that such general sound laws have not yet been discovered, that, rather, a relatively narrow spatial and temporal limitation must be placed upon all hitherto defined sound laws, he will find the absolute necessity that would seem to be a presupposition for exceptionless laws lacking. The spatial and temporal relativity of sound laws is not a simple one. Rather it is a complicated one […] The relationship of the sound laws to their external expansion is characteristically variable and fortuitous. (p. 46)
- Schuchardt (1972)

Even though I do not want to compare sound laws simply with the laws of fashionable dress as F. Müller does, nevertheless these laws seem to me to be to a great extent matters of fashion, i.e. matters of conscious or half-conscious imitation […] I shall not go far astray if I consider the unexceptionability of the sound laws as incompatible with the share that consciousness, in my opinion, has in sound change. (p. 50)
- Schuchardt (1972)

I find it even more remarkable that the psychological bases of sound change, the social character of a language, the fluid borders of its spatial and temporal variations can be perceived with such lucidity and, at the same time, that unexceptionability of the sound laws can be defended so staunchly. (p. 62)
- Schuchardt (1972)