Learn English – Origin of “you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide”

It looks to me as though Ian Fleming is the first author to have used the expression, "Nothing propinks like propinquity." A Google Books search for propinks strikes out on anything older than 1956, as does a Library of Congress newspaper search for the word propinks across the period 1836–1922.

The online attributions to P.G. Wodehouse seem based on a conversation in Right Ho, Jeeves in which Jeeves suggests propinquity as the word Bertie Wooster is trying to think of, and Bertie confirms that it is. (The conversation appears on the Association of Independent Librarians page that Hot Licks links to in a comment above.) None of the online attributions of the quotation "Nothing propinks like propinquity" either to Wodehouse or to Dorothy Parker that a Google Books search turns up identify a page in the author's work where the expression appears. This is a warning sign (though not a definitive proof in the negative) of false attribution.

The only quotations involving propinquity that make their way into The Oxford Book of Quotations, third edition (1979) are from Shakespeare, King Lear:

Here I disclaim all my paternal care,/Propinquity and property of blood,/And as a stranger to my heart and me/Hold thee from this for ever.

and from Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Robert Elsmere (1888):

'Propinquity does it'—as Mrs. Thornburgh is always reminding us.

The quote from Robert Elsmere has much in common with "Nothing propinks..." as an idea, but I don't think that Ian Fleming owes her any royalties on the wording he devised.

Great minds think alike:

• This is a humorous expression that is used when you found out someone else was thinking about the same thing as you were. If you say, "Great minds think alike," you say, jokingly, that you and someone else must be very intelligent or great because both of you thought of the same thing or agree on something.

• The earliest instance of the proverb in its present form seems be from 1898:-

  • "Curious how great minds think alike. My pupil wrote me the same explanation about his non-appearance." (1898 C. G. Robertson Voces Academicae)

According to "A Dictionary of Catch Phrases" by Eric Partridge, the expression "great minds think alike " does not appear to have a specific origin:

• The saying does not appear in the dictionaries of quotations, nor in those of proverbs. It seems to have aside c. 1890 or perhaps a decade earlier.....

• Any remark , especially a trivial one, that could be answered by" I happened to think the same" could be capped with 'great minds think alike", a sentence that has become so embedded in ordinary everyday English that on 7 Oct.1973 one of london 'nationals' had an article entitled "Great Minds Think Unlike"

• Unimpressed listeners to the great minds are sometimes apt to remark, 'and fools seldom differ':

Also according to Ngram the expression is from the late 19th century.

As suggested by the Phrase Finder, and by The Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs it may derive from the older saying :

• Good wits doe jumpe:

from Dabridgcourt Belchier who wrote this in Hans Beer-Pot, 1618: