Classification — Wrong Words
He said something close. The slogan came later.
The line
“Be the change you wish to see in the world.”
Where it comes from
Gandhi, in one line, on a mug, a poster, a graduation speech. It is such a tidy summary of his philosophy that it is rarely asked whether he wrote it. No sentence in this form has been found in his writings or speeches.
First in print
The nearest passage we can verify is in Indian Opinion, August 1913: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.” It is the same idea, in a longer and plainer sentence with no command in it.
M. K. Gandhi, Indian Opinion, August 1913; reprinted in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 13. The short form does not appear there.
How it travelled
Over the twentieth century the idea was compressed, and then turned into an instruction. Close wordings circulate from the 1970s, in the literature of personal change, and by the internet age the compact form was set on Gandhi. In 2011 the writer Brian Morton went looking for it in the New York Times and reported that he could not find it in Gandhi’s work.
What we could not settle
Who first put the compact sentence in Gandhi’s mouth, and when. We have not found the first printing that names him. If you can, write to us.