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  • 2016-03-01 (xsd:date)
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  • 'First They Ignore You, Then They Laugh at You' Quote Isn't Gandhi's (en)
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  • On 29 February 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump shared the above-displayed image to his Instagram page, attributing the quote first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win to Mahatma Gandhi. This quote is frequently attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, but in actuality there is no record of the peace advocate ever saying this. In June 2011, the Christian Science Monitor included the quote in its list of the 10 most famous things never actually said, and while we were able to find several high-profile politicians attributing this quote to Gandhi, we were unable to locate any credible source that directly connected Gandhi to these exact words. It appeared to be in part a paraphrase from the book Freedom's Battle, a collection of essays and speeches written and compiled by Gandhi. He wrote about introducing his particular form of determined, but nonviolent protest, which he termed satyagraha, from the Sanskrit and Hindi term for holding onto truth: But a speech by union leader Nicholas Klein in 1914 provides a closer version of the misattributed quote: Donald Trump is hardly the first person to attribute this homily to Gandhi, and in fact it's a popular misattribution from politicians — several others, including Sarah Palin, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, recently made similar mistakes: Gandhi's name has been associated with this quote since at least 1982, when the Workshop Of Nonviolence Institute summed up Gandhi's philosophy in an issue of WIN Magazine: The misattributed quote, then, is most likely a combination of Klein's 1914 speech combined with an attempt to summarize Gandhi's nonviolent doctrine and philosophy. (en)
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