“Criticism is something you can easily avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.”

Misattributed
Source: Elbert Hubbard, Little Journeys to the Homes of American Statesmen (1898), p. 370 http://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435065322687?urlappend=%3Bseq=458: "If you would escape moral and physical assassination, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing—court obscurity, for only in oblivion does safety lie." Other versions of the saying were repeated in several of Hubbard's later writings.

John North Willys (as reprinted in Elbert Hubbard's Selected Writings, Part 2 (1998), pp. 331–337, Roycrofters, 1922).
Pamphlets
Source: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Vol. 3: American Statesmen

Source: Brave New World

Quoted in Jack Fishman's My Darling Clementine, the biography of Winston Churchill's wife. (p. 131).

"All You Need Is Love"
Lyrics

Source: Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don't

Often misquoted or paraphrased as "The only way to avoid metaphysics is to say nothing." Cf. on the next page, "you cannot avoid metaphysics".
Source: The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science (1925), p. 224

Panel with Edward Said at Columbia University, New York, April 1999 http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/07/042214
Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999
Context: Let me just put the whole thing in a kind of mundane level. Like, suppose you walk out in the street, this evening, and you see a crime being committed, you know, somebody is robbing someone else. Well, you have three choices. One choice is to try to stop it, maybe you call 911 or something. Another choice is to do nothing. A third choice is to pick up an assault rifle and kill 'em both, and kill a bystander at the same time. Well, suppose you do that, and somebody says, "Well, you know, why did you do that?" And you say, "Look, I couldn't stand by and do nothing." I mean, is that a response? If you can think of nothing that wouldn't do harm, then do nothing. And the same is true, magnified, in international affairs. Apart from the fact that there were things that could have been done.