It’s perhaps the most famous cliché-killer of the twenty-first century, regularly whipped out with buzzkill glee and a barely suppressed smirk. But who was the first to say, “Actually, Gandhi never said, ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’”? Alas, the origins of this quote are lost in the annals of assholedom.

The quote is sometimes attributed to Larry Festerman, a former college radical who was infamous for correcting widely believed but harmless misinformation. There is evidence that Festerman did correct people on the Gandhi misattribution but there is no evidence he actually felt better about himself.

Robert Axelrod, a midwestern middle school teacher, has sometimes had the quote attributed to him, but what he actually said was, “Actually, Nirvana’s ‘The Man Who Sold the World” is a Bowie cover,” a statement that did not make him any cooler with his students.

Cye McSorley has been credited with the quote, but what he actually said was, “Actually, what Gandhi said was: ‘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.’” This is very similar to the more common correction but far too specific and nuanced to be quoted by anyone who just wants to prove they’re smarter than you.

Making things further complicated are the many counter-counter-quoters who argue, “Actually, that’s the basic idea of what Gandhi said even if those aren’t his actual words,” annoyingly putting “actually” and “actual” in air quotes.

Some of the most compelling evidence points to newspaper columnist Elroy “Bob” Stinton, who, in 1956, wrote the following in The San Diego Falderal:

Actually, Mohandas Gandhi (known to his friends as “Mo”) was on day 21 of his hunger strike to protest British rule in India. While reclining weakly against a shipment of Klondike Bars sent from American supporters with only the best intentions, Gandhi looked up at his entourage and said, “Mondays, am I right?”

Gandhi’s acolytes smiled and nodded, chuckling politely at their master’s wisdom, for, even when fighting for self-governance and the end to a century of colonialism, who among them had not suffered a bad case of the Mondays?

But it was crowded there in the hut where Gandhi kept himself occupied by praying and autographing head shots. Not everyone could get inside where the Mahatma lay due to space limitations and a strict dress code (“No Shoes, No Shirt, No Gandhi”). A murmur went through the crowd, “What did he say? What did he say?”

Among those present was Naresh Gupta, a bracelet maker who had earned something of a reputation in Calcutta for his engravings and halitosis. Gupta was also quite the globetrotter and was known to encourage customers to broaden their minds through travel.

“What did he say? What did he say?” the crowd continued just as Gupta was completing a transaction on some Mahatma commemorative swag. In one of those breaks in the noise that sometimes occurs, Gupta cheerfully called out to his customer, “Keep the change… And you want to see the world!”

The crowd cheered and began repeating, “Be the change you want to see in the world! Be the change you want to see in the world!”

The words carried so loudly and for so long that Gandhi passively resisted telling them all to pipe down. Instead, he ripped open a box of Klondike Bars and muttered, “I have an ice cream,” a phrase that was later misappropriated by Martin Luther King.

Apocryphal? Possibly. In the end, perhaps we will never know for certain the original speaker of this quote, though it was definitely a dude.

And, actually, it’s “quotation,” not “quote.”