It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the egg
Not Thatcher’s line — a folk proverb she quotedAnonymous (African-American folk proverb)In print by 1881 · collected from the African-American oral tradition
Margaret Thatcher really did use this saying — at a private dinner in 1987, and again in a Washington lecture in September 1991 — but she was quoting, not coining, and neither of her recorded wordings is the one that circulates under her name. Quote Investigator’s chronology ↗ traces the proverb back through American newspapers to 1881, when Joel Chandler Harris printed it among the “Plantation Proverbs” he collected from the African-American oral tradition.
“It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the egg” It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the egg. —an African-American folk proverb in print by 1881, quoted (not coined) by Margaret Thatcher · Verbatim: “Rooster makes mo’ racket dan de hin w’at lay de aig.”
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Margaret Thatcher. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Provenance
The source
Earliest printed match
Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings
Collected by
Joel Chandler Harris, 1881 — in the “Plantation Proverbs” section
Thatcher’s own versions
A private dinner, 1987; the First Clare Boothe Luce Lecture, Washington DC, 23 September 1991
Origin
African-American oral tradition; a differently worded precursor recorded from 1659
Rooster makes mo’ racket dan de hin w’at lay de aig.
Harris printed the proverb in the heavy eye-dialect he used throughout Uncle Remus. In plain English: the rooster makes more racket than the hen that laid the egg.
Quote Investigator ↗ dates that printing to the 1881 D. Appleton edition, p. 151, and records a differently worded precursor — “The cock crows but the hen goes” — in proverb collections from 1659.
The same page reproduces both Thatcher wordings: “The cocks may crow, but it’s the hen that lays the egg,” which Robert Skidelsky reported hearing at a private dinner in 1987 (Sunday Times, 9 April 1989), and “although the cock may crow, it is the hen that lays the egg,” from her First Clare Boothe Luce Lecture in Washington on 23 September 1991. Neither is the wording in circulation.
We could not read the Thatcher Archive text of the 1991 lecture ourselves — margaretthatcher.org was unreachable from this run — so the 1991 wording rests on Quote Investigator’s transcription and its citation of that archive, not on our own reading of the primary document.
✓Public domain
The excerpt above comes from Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, first published in 1881 and long in the public domain in the United States — Project Gutenberg ↗ distributes the full text freely. Thatcher’s own 1987 and 1991 wordings are separate, far later utterances and are not public domain.
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.
Fact-check
Often misattributed
The proverb is old, widely travelled, and has been pinned on more than one modern politician.
~
Popularly credited toMargaret Thatcher Quoted, not authored
She used it — Quote Investigator ↗ documents a 1987 dinner and a 1991 Washington lecture — but the saying was already a century old in print, and her two recorded wordings differ from the version now sold under her name.
~
Also credited toAnn Richards Early user, not the origin
Quote Investigator records the Texas governor using a Texan variant at a San Francisco fundraiser in 1992: “As we say in Texas, the rooster may crow, but the hens deliver the goods.” See the chronology ↗.
~
Sometimes credited toJoel Chandler Harris Collector, not author
✓The honest answer is that nobody knows who first said it. Quote Investigator’s conclusion ↗ is that the saying “can be traced back more than one hundred years to African-American folklore, and precursor sayings existed centuries earlier.”
Context
Why it mattered
Thatcher used the line as a weapon, not a decoration. In the 1991 Washington lecture she explained that she had made the point “rather brutally” at a dinner given by a British think tank, where, as she put it, politicians counted for little and it was the ideas of intellectuals that were held to rule the world. Paul Johnson, writing in 2007 about a 1980s dinner he attended, describes her delivering it as the tenth speaker and the only woman, after being kept waiting until nearly midnight.
That is a long way from the tidy line about female achievement it has become, and further still from its actual origins in a body of proverbs collected on Southern plantations.
Although the cock may crow, it is the hen that lays the egg.
Read the full story
The chain of printings Quote Investigator assembles ↗ runs from Harris’s 1881 “Plantation Proverbs” through American newspapers in 1904, 1907, 1914 and 1916, and turns up in a 1944 Richmond advertisement that oddly labelled it a “new proverb” from wartime England.
Paul Johnson’s 2007 account has the detail only someone in the room would keep: he laughed, long and loud, and then realised he was the only one who found it funny.
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The author
About Anonymous (African-American folk proverb)
AP
Anonymous (African-American folk proverb)
In print by 1881 · African-American oral tradition · popularly mis-credited to Margaret Thatcher
The saying has no known author. It was collected from the African-American oral tradition of the post-war South and first printed by Joel Chandler Harris in 1881, in the “Plantation Proverbs” that open Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. It circulated anonymously in American newspapers for the next eighty years before any politician was credited with it.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
The primary source (Chicago)
Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1881), “Plantation Proverbs,” p. 151, per Garson O’Toole, “Quote Origin: The Rooster May Crow, But It’s the Hen Who Lays the Egg,” Quote Investigator, April 14, 2013.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘It may be the cock that crows, but it is the hen that lays the egg’?” Last verified 19 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/it-may-be-the-cock-that-crows-but-it-is-the-hen-that-lays/