Mahatma Gandhi (Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi) quotes
1869 – 1948 · Modern India, late 19th–mid 20th century · Lawyer, anti-colonial leader, political ethicist
About Mahatma Gandhi (Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi)
Born in Porbandar in 1869, Gandhi developed a political ethic linking personal discipline and ethical conduct to public resistance against injustice. His early-20th-century writings argue that inner reform and nonviolent action are foundational to social change; his collected writings are published in the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi.
Works: Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi; essays and articles (notably writings from 1913)
Quotes
“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”
Source: no specific work is documented · Check the source
Disputed attributionWhat we know
- What is documented
- The wording is commonly credited to Gandhi but no primary source has been found; the closest authentic passage is a 1913 text about self-change altering worldly tendencies.
- What remains uncertain
- Scholars judge the short sentence apocryphal—a later paraphrase—since the exact phrase is absent from Gandhi’s published works and shows up in modern decades.
The line captures Gandhi’s central claim that social change begins with self-transformation. It’s not found in his Collected Works; instead it compresses a longer, documented argument that changing ourselves alters social tendencies.