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Who really said it

The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted

Spoken by Mother Teresa 1910–1997 · Albanian-born Indian Roman Catholic sister; Nobel Peace Prize, 1979
Verified In copyright

These are Mother Teresa’s words, written down by the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge in Something Beautiful for God (1971) — the book that grew out of his 1969 BBC documentary about her. Wikiquote ↗ carries it in its sourced 1970s section with that citation.

Last verified 18 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Verified quote & credit

“The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted” Mother Teresa, as quoted by Malcolm Muggeridge in Something Beautiful for God (1971). quotle.info/who-said/the-biggest-disease-today-is-not-leprosy-or-tuberculosis/

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by the estate of Malcolm Muggeridge and the book’s publishers). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Mother Teresa — Albanian-born Indian Roman Catholic sister · Nobel Peace Prize, 1979. Theme: "The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

The source

Recorded in
Something Beautiful for God
Recorded by
Malcolm Muggeridge
Published
1971
Grew out of
Muggeridge’s 1969 BBC documentary of the same name

The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted.

Mother Teresa ran a home for the dying in Calcutta and treated leprosy patients, so the comparison was not rhetorical for her — she is measuring loneliness against the two diseases she dealt with daily.

Wikiquote’s sourced entry for this line

How we verified this

  • Fetched the raw wikitext of Wikiquote’s Mother Teresa page ↗. The line sits in the sourced 1970s section, cited to Muggeridge’s Something Beautiful for God (1971), with the citation linking to page 73 of the book.
  • Confirmed the book’s details against Wikipedia’s article on it ↗: a 1971 book by Malcolm Muggeridge about Mother Teresa, based on a 1969 BBC documentary of the same name.
  • Checked Wikiquote’s Misattributed section for Mother Teresa. It flags the “People are often unreasonable…” text as Kent M. Keith’s Paradoxical Commandments, but raises nothing against this line.
  • We could not read Something Beautiful for God ourselves — every copy on the Internet Archive is lending-restricted — so our citation names the book without a page, and the page-73 locator above is reported as Wikiquote’s, not as our own reading.
In copyright

The words are Mother Teresa’s, but the work that records them — Muggeridge’s Something Beautiful for God — was first published in 1971 and remains in copyright in the United States. Quoting a single sentence for commentary is a different matter from the book’s status; we flag the status rather than claim the line is free to reuse.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Context

Why it mattered

Muggeridge went to Calcutta as a sceptic and came back a convert to her cause; his BBC film and then this book are, more than anything else, what turned a little-known nun into an international figure. The sentence is from that first introduction of her to a Western audience.

It is also a deliberate provocation aimed at that audience. Leprosy and the dying were what her order actually worked among. Telling comfortable Western readers that the worse affliction was the one they had at home — the feeling of being unwanted — was the point.

Read the full story

Muggeridge was not an uncomplicated witness. He had been the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent and one of the few Western journalists to report Stalin’s famine in Ukraine; he was also, by his own account, an agnostic when he arrived in Calcutta, and he entered the Catholic Church in 1982.

Christopher Hitchens later attacked both the book and its author at length in The Missionary Position, arguing that Muggeridge’s enthusiasm did much to build a reputation he thought unearned. That argument is about Mother Teresa’s legacy, not about whether she said this sentence — which nobody disputes.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Kindness Love Character

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Mother Teresaen.wikiquote.org

The sourced entry for this line, plus a Misattributed section listing what she did not say.
Something Beautiful for Goden.wikipedia.org

The 1971 Muggeridge book that records the quotation, and the 1969 BBC film behind it.
Malcolm Muggeridgeen.wikipedia.org

The journalist who wrote the line down, and whose account of her has been contested.
Mother Teresaen.wikipedia.org

Biography, the Missionaries of Charity, and the criticism of her work.
Missionaries of Charityen.wikipedia.org

The order she founded, including its leprosy and hospice work in Calcutta.

The author

About Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa

1910–1997 · Albanian-born Indian Roman Catholic sister · Nobel Peace Prize, 1979

Mother Teresa, born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Skopje, founded the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta in 1950 and spent nearly fifty years running homes for the dying, the abandoned and people with leprosy. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and was canonised in 2016. Her private letters, published in 2007, revealed decades of religious doubt that almost nobody around her had suspected.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The primary source (Chicago)

Muggeridge, Malcolm. Something Beautiful for God: Mother Teresa of Calcutta. London: Collins, 1971. Quoting Mother Teresa.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted’?” Last verified 18 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-biggest-disease-today-is-not-leprosy-or-tuberculosis/

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