Anonymous · French form 1742 or earlier · in English print by 1796
Nobody knows who first said “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”. It is a folk proverb that came into English from French: on ne saurait faire d’omelette sans casser des œufs. An English version was printed in Dublin in 1796, and Robert Louis Stevenson used the familiar form in 1897. In the twentieth century it became shorthand for the claim that the ends justify the means. That is how it came to be pinned on Soviet leaders.