There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing and be nothing.

Source: Elbert Hubbard, Little Journeys to the Homes of American Statesmen (1898), p. 370: "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.