Statement at the signing of the Declaration of Independence (1776-07-04), quoted as an anecdote in The Works of Benjamin Franklin by Jared Sparks (1840). However, this had earlier been attributed to Richard Penn in Memoirs of a Life, Chiefly Passed in Pennsylvania, Within the Last Sixty Years (1811, p. 116). In 1801, “If we don’t hang together, by Heavens we shall hang separately” appears in the English play Life by Frederick Reynolds (Life, Frederick Reynolds, in a collection by Mrs Inchbald, 1811, Google Books first published in 1801), and the remark was later attributed to ‘An American General’ by Reynolds in his 1826 memoir p.358. A comparable pun on “hang alone … hang together” appears in Dryden’s 1717 The Spanish Fryar. The pun also appears in an April 14, 1776 letter from Carter Braxton to Landon Carter,Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, Vol.1 (1921), p.421, as “a true saying of a Wit — We must hang together or separately.”
Zhuang Zhou (Wikipedia)Zhuang Zhou (/dʒuˈɑːŋ ˈdʒoʊ/), commonly known as Zhuangzi (/ˈdʒwɑːŋˈdzʌ/; Chinese: 莊子; literally “Master Zhuang”; also rendered in the Wade–Giles romanization as Chuang Tzu), was an influential Chinese philosopher who lived around the 4th century BCE during the Warring States period, a period of great development in Chinese philosophy, the Hundred Schools of Thought. He is credited with writing—in part or in whole—a work known by his name, the Zhuangzi, which is one of two foundational texts of Taoism, alongside the Tao Te Ching.