Did Leibniz really say "We live in the best of all possible worlds"?

Not in those words. Leibniz argued that God chose the best of all possible worlds. The breezy first-person slogan comes from his mocker: Voltaire's Candide put the phrase in a fool's mouth and ran it into the ground, and the parody ended up quoted as the original.

The version going around

"We live in the best of all possible worlds." - attributed to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

The receipt

Here is Leibniz in the Theodicy (1710), in E. M. Huggard's English translation, section 168:

"These metaphysical considerations concern the nature of the possible and of the necessary; they go against my fundamental assumption that God has chosen the best of all possible worlds." - Leibniz, Theodicy, 1710, sec. 168, trans. Huggard

Third person, about God's choice among possible worlds, inside a technical argument about necessity and freedom. Search the full English text and "we live in the best" never appears. We ran that search before publishing this page.

Where the slogan actually comes from

Voltaire's Candide (1759) exists to ridicule the idea. Dr. Pangloss, the book's resident philosopher, is introduced this way:

"He proved admirably that there is no effect without a cause, and that, in this best of all possible worlds, the Baron's castle was the most magnificent of castles, and his lady the best of all possible Baronesses." - Voltaire, Candide, 1759, public-domain English translation

The novel then marches Pangloss through war, shipwreck, the Lisbon earthquake, and the Inquisition while he keeps insisting that all is for the best. The parody was so good it overwrote the original. What circulates as Leibniz's cheerful boast is closer to Pangloss's punchline with the attribution swapped back onto the target. Quote it as Leibniz and you are crediting a man with the joke made at his expense.

What Leibniz was actually claiming

His argument was an answer to the problem of evil, not a denial of evil. Any world with less evil in it would, he argued, have been a worse world on the whole. You can think the argument fails. Voltaire did, at book length. But it is an argument, not a mood, and its author never chirped the sentence the internet gives him.

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