To borrow a phrase

Two quotations for your consumption and contemplation:\n“But if a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under and see whither they are going, it is not to be wondered that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavor to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was first erected.”\n“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object , evinces a design to reduce them (the people) under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”\nThe latter passage might appear vaguely familiar to you, as it is the climax in our Declaration of Independence. You might not have noticed before the uncanny relation it bears to the former passage from John Locke’s earlier essay “The Second Treatise of Civil Government.” If Thomas Jefferson tried to throw readers off this scent, he failed spectacularly. It is worth mentioning further that Jefferson resisted poorly the temptation to stop his “lifting” there. He reworked Locke’s emphasis on “life, liberty and property” to furnish a better-wrought phrase that since has become much better known.\nThis particular kind of originality is under siege nowadays. We call it plagiarism, conflating it with theft.\nI dissent. Trespassing intellectual “property” is deemed wrongly a capital crime for writers. As John Donne said, “No man is an island unto himself.” Who can deny that the deft rearrangement of purloined material is itself a form of wit? That will take some arguing, I admit. But when imitation selects its sculptures scrupulously, and carves them down cleanly, the sculptures may be able to achieve a Jeffersonian synthesis in which the byproduct has attained a stature the original fell short of.\nDon’t get me wrong: I am not advocating a lazy plagiarism – or lamely for its own sake. But this must be part of my point. What are cliches but dull formulations repeated ad nauseam that fall outside the realm of plagiarism? \nThere must be some distinction between “theft” and “borrowing,” and it is not as feeble as you might think. True, borrowed material is usually returned, but who would deny that improvements upon it don’t yield even greater profits? Are we to accept that nothing can exceed the quality of an original, that the embryo is superior to the full-grown man? The poet Milton said that “borrowing” from another author, only “if it be not bettered by the borrower, among good authors is accounted Plagiare.”\nLest you are inclined to rebuke my point too swiftly, know that every time we “refuse to budge an inch,” speak of “green-eyed jealousy” or claim to be “tongue-tied,” we are unthinkingly quoting Shakespeare, who himself appropriated exact wording or close renditions from previous writers without attribution. \nI hope and believe the reader will have already identified the unacknowledged quotation in the above. Dare I hope there’s only one?