If We Could Change Ourselves The

From the Gujarati edition of Indian Opinion, 9 August 1913, as translated in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 12, p. 158. This is the authentic source of what is popularly paraphrased as "Be the change you wish to see in the world" — a phrase Gandhi never actually wrote or spoke in that form. Quote investigator Garson O'Toole traced the popular version to a 1974 essay by Brooklyn teacher Arleen Lorrance. Gandhi's original passage is more contextual: he is discussing how personal purification affects the social world around us, drawing on Hindu teachings about the relationship between the inner and the outer life.