“It is forbidden to dwell in the vicinity of any of those with an evil tongue, and all the more to sit with them and listen to their words.”

"A Task"
Context: We were permitted to shriek in the tongue of dwarfs and demons
But pure and generous words were forbidden
Under so stiff a penalty that whoever dared to pronounce one
Considered himself as a lost man.

5 December 2004 article on New York Times https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B01E5DD1730F936A25751C1A9629C8B63
2001

Final sermon

A Health, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Winston Churchill, in "The Defence of Freedom and Peace (The Lights are Going Out)", radio broadcast to the United States and to London (16 October 1938).
The 1930s
Context: People say we ought not to allow ourselves to be drawn into a theoretical antagonism between Nazidom and democracy; but the antagonism is here now. It is this very conflict of spiritual and moral ideas which gives the free countries a great part of their strength. You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police. On all sides they are guarded by masses of armed men, cannons, aeroplanes, fortifications, and the like — they boast and vaunt themselves before the world, yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts; words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home — all the more powerful because forbidden — terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind. Cannons, airplanes, they can manufacture in large quantities; but how are they to quell the natural promptings of human nature, which after all these centuries of trial and progress has inherited a whole armoury of potent and indestructible knowledge?

Apprenez que tout flatteur
Vit aux dépens de celui qui l'écoute.
Book I (1668), fable 2. Variant translations: Learn now that every flatterer lives at the cost of those who give him credit.
In exchange for your cheese I will give you a piece of advice for the future — Do not trust flatterers.
Every flatterer lives at the expense of him who listens to him.
Fables (1668–1679)

Rescue (1945)
Context: Someone will read as moral
That the people of Rome or Warsaw
Haggle, laugh, make love
As they pass by martyrs' pyres.
Someone else will read
Of the passing of things human,
Of the oblivion
Born before the flames have died. But that day I thought only
Of the loneliness of the dying,
Of how, when Giordano
Climbed to his burning
There were no words
In any human tongue
To be left for mankind,
Mankind who live on.

One Writer's Beginnings(1984)

No sale de lo malo quien está en él, porque teme encontrarse... con lo malo.
Voces (1943)