More often than one thinks the answer is: no – at any rate not in the form in which it is quoted. That is not the fault of careless quoters but of the state of the transmission. Hegel’s Groundlines consist of several layers of text with different authors and different degrees of authority, and in printed editions they often stand beneath one another without being marked.
The layers
What Hegel himself published is the main text of the paragraphs and the notes printed with them in the first edition. For that alone he took responsibility.
Hegel’s own lecture notes – marginalia in his own copy and sheets prepared for lecturing. By him, but not written for the public, and often in the form of catchwords.
Transcripts by his students – Wannenmann 1817/18, Homeyer 1818/19, Hotho 1822/23, Griesheim 1824/25 and others. What stands there is something Hegel may have said; the wording is the writer’s.
The Additions – after Hegel’s death Eduard Gans compiled continuous paragraphs out of such transcripts for the edition of 1833 and placed them after the paragraphs. In his preface Gans himself conceded that the choice of words is at times his own. These Additions are the most readable and therefore the most quoted part of the book.
One example in which everything shows
The most notorious Hegel sentence of all runs, in its circulating form: „The state is the march of God through the world.“ It counts as proof that Hegel deified the state. Two things about this one sentence are wrong.
First, it does not stand in Hegel’s text. It stands in the Addition to § 258, that is, in Gans’s compilation.
Second, even the Addition does not say it. What stands there is:
… for whether the human being knows it or not, this essence realises itself as a self-subsistent power in which particular individuals are only moments: it is the march of God in the world that the state is; its ground is the power of reason actualising itself as will.
Addition to § 258 (compiled by Eduard Gans from lecture transcripts)
What is said, then, is: that there are states at all is not the work of human beings alone. That is a statement about the institution as such – not the claim that any particular state is divine. The circulating form turns a sentence about there being a state into a sentence about the state. The difference is the whole dispute.
Why this is more than pedantry
The question decides the most influential charge against Hegel. In 1959 Walter Kaufmann examined the technique of citation with which Karl Popper declared Hegel a forerunner of totalitarianism, and showed that Popper works with montages in which sentences from different contexts are assembled by ellipses into an apparently continuous passage. In one case all eight fragments of a single such „quotation“ come from students’ lecture transcripts – not one word of it from the book Hegel wrote.
What this edition therefore does differently
It sets the layers side by side, separated and named. Under each paragraph there stands first Hegel’s printed text, then his note, then – each of them marked – his own jottings, the transcripts of the individual lecture courses, and Gans’s Addition. One sees at a glance who is speaking.
From this follows a plain rule for reading: before you use a sentence of Hegel’s, look at which layer it stands in. That is not chicanery. It is the difference between a quotation and a rumour.
Sources. Walter Kaufmann, „The Hegel Myth and Its Method“, 1959 · Jon Stewart (ed.), The Hegel Myths and Legends, 1996 · Karl-Heinz Ilting (ed.), Hegel. Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie 1818–1831, 4 vols., 1973/74 · authoritative today: Gesammelte Werke, vols. 26,1–26,3, Meiner 2014/15. – See also: Notes on the layers of the text · § 258.