“Sikander burnt all books the same wise as fire burns hay. All the scintillating works faced destruction in the same manner that lotus flowers face with the onset of frosty winter.”

Source: The Induction (1563), Line 1, p. 309

John Proctor
The Crucible (1953)
Context: A fire, a fire is burning! I hear the boot of Lucifer, I see his filthy face! And it is my face, and yours, Danforth! For them that quail to bring men out of ignorance, as I have quailed, and as you quail now when you know in all your black hearts that this be fraud — God damns our kind especially, and we will burn, we will burn together!

Nītiśataka 65
Śatakatraya

Source: 1790s, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790–1793), Proverbs of Hell, Lines 8–9

Montaigne, Essais, liv. III, chap. viii.—Faugère
The Art of Persuasion
Context: All who say the same things do not possess them in the same manner; and hence the incomparable author of the Art of Conversation http://books.google.com/books?id=iRBEAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA452& pauses with so much care to make it understood that we must not judge of the capacity of a man by the excellence of a happy remark that we heard him make.... let us penetrate, says he, the mind from which it proceeds... it will oftenest be seen that he will be made to disavow it on the spot, and will be drawn very far from this better thought in which he does not believe, to plunge himself into another, quite base and ridiculous.

Source: The Battle of the Labyrinth

Another John Doe
Lyrics, You Are Here (2008)

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