He said something close. The slogan came later.
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
Gandhi, Indian Opinion, 1913 — “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change”; the slogan is a later compression
The issues
One sentence an issue, traced properly
Every issue takes one famous line and follows it back through print to the earliest source we can verify. Open an issue to read it in full.
He never said it. She wrote it, as a summary of him.
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Evelyn Beatrice Hall, The Friends of Voltaire, 1906 — her summary of his attitude, not his sentence
She never said it, and the man who did was writing about someone else
“Let them eat cake.”
Rousseau, Les Confessions, Book VI — a great princess, never named, written c. 1765, long before Marie Antoinette was in France
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