“It is a good world to live in,
To lend, or to spend, or to give in;
But to beg or to borrow, or to get a man's own,
It is the very worst world that ever was known.”

I, who ne'er
Went for myself a begging, go a borrowing,
And that for others. Borrowing's much the same
As begging; just as lending upon usury
Is much the same as thieving.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise (1779), Act II, scene II http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/natws10.txt
Misattributed

Of his father, who died in William's infancy.
I Used to Believe I Had Forever — Now I'm Not So Sure (1968)

2000s, CNN interview (2000)

Paul Tanner, in "Free Women: 1"<!-- p. 173 -->
The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.

Source: Science and Imagination: Selected Papers, 1967, p. 82

The Provoked Wife (1698)

Part III, Chapter XIII, The Reservoir Plan and Credit Control, p. 154
Storage and Stability (1937)