Can "neither" be placed at the beginning of the sentence?

Solution 1:

Either is correct, as "nor" follows a negative statement in both cases. For example "Neither borrower nor lender be" from Shakespeare's Hamlet...one could do worse than depend on Shakespeare ;-)

Solution 2:

You can certainly place neither at the start of a sentence. The problem with your sentence doing so is that it suffers from faulty parallelism whereby the neither precedes a verb and the parallel nor precedes a noun phrase.

The words Neither trust a new friend ... lead the reader to expect a continuation such as nor lend him any money or nor tell him your deepest secret. When you thwart the reader's expectations in such a way you have written a garden-path sentence.

EDIT: On reflection, it could be claimed that the verb trust is implicit after nor and can be elided. At any rate the sentence is not an egregrious garden path.

Solution 3:

An inscription on the James Farley Post Office in New York City reads:

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.[1]

This phrase was a translation by Prof. George Herbert Palmer, Harvard University, from an ancient Greek work of Herodotus describing the Persian system of mounted postal carriers c. 500 B.C.E. The inscription was added to the building by William Mitchell Kendall of the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White, the building's architects. It derives from a quote from Herodotus' Histories, referring to the courier service of the ancient Persian Empire...

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Postal_Service_creed