“There are no bridges in folk songs because the peasants died building them.”

Lini
(15 October 1991)

July 14, 1852
Journals (1838-1859)

And I said "Right."
Spoken on the Track "The Story of Reuben Clamzo" on the album One Night.

"The Singer of Folk Songs and His Conscience"

Les hommes construisent trop de murs et pas assez de ponts.
This became widely attributed to Isaac Newton after Dominique Pire ascribed it to "the words of Newton" in his Nobel Lecture, 11 December 1958. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1958/pire-lecture.html Pire refers not to Isaac, but to Joseph Fort Newton, who is widely reported to have said "People are lonely because they build walls instead of bridges." This appears to be paraphrased from a longer passage found in his essays and addresses, The One Great Church: Adventures of Faith (1948), pp. 51–52: "Why are so many people shy, lonely, shut up within themselves, unequal to their tasks, unable to be happy? Because they are inhabited by fear, like the man in the Parable of the Talents, erecting walls around themselves instead of building bridges into the lives of others; shutting out life."
Misattributed

This has appeared as a variant of Sun Tzu's assertion to "leave a way of escape." Tu Mu, commenting on Sun Tzu, advises, "Show him there is a road to safety..." Ch. 7; it has also recently appeared on the internet attributed to Scipio Africanus, but without citation.
Disputed