Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

Silence is argument carried out by other means

Not Che Guevara — traced to a 1983 novel about him Jay Cantor born 1948 · American novelist and essayist
Disputed In copyright

No speech, book or letter by Guevara contains this line. The earliest appearance we found is in the narration of Jay Cantor’s novel The Death of Che Guevara (Knopf, 1983), worded “silence is argument carried on by other means.” Quote books then credited it to Guevara himself, starting with Robert Byrne in 1986.

Last verified 2 Nov 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Silence is argument carried out by other means” Jay Cantor, The Death of Che Guevara: A Novel (Knopf, 1983); often misattributed to Che Guevara. · Verbatim: “Silence is argument carried on by other means.”

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Che Guevara. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Jay Cantor / Alfred A. Knopf (Penguin Random House)). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Jay Cantor — American novelist and essayist. Theme: "Silence is argument carried out by other means". 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.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Silence is argument carried out by other means". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where the line actually appears

Work
The Death of Che Guevara: A Novel
Author
Jay Cantor (a novel, not Guevara’s own writing)
Publisher
Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1983
Original wording
“silence is argument carried on by other means”

The others chattered on for a bit, until they saw him; then, one by one, they too grew quiet; waited. His silence was another manner of argument (silence is argument carried on by other means). When he had said all he could think to say… Fiction, 1983

Pieced together from overlapping Internet Archive full-text search snippets of the 1983 Knopf edition and the 1984 Vintage paperback. The scan is lending-restricted, so we did not read the full page. Note the novel says “carried on”; the popular “carried out” is a later drift in quote collections.

The Death of Che Guevara (Knopf, 1983) on the Internet Archive

How a novelist’s sentence became a Che quote

In copyright

The earliest wording we found comes from Jay Cantor’s novel The Death of Che Guevara, published by Knopf in 1983 and carrying a copyright notice in Cantor’s name. A 1983 work is in copyright in the US. Quoting a single sentence for commentary is ordinary fair use, but the line is 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

Why everyone thinks Che said it

The line sounds like a guerrilla’s aphorism: it echoes Clausewitz’s “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” It also turns up in a book with Guevara’s name in the title. Quote compilers took a novelist’s narration for the revolutionary’s own words.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara Not his

No source is given in any of the quote collections we found. Even Wikiquote ↗ cites only a 2005 self-help book, not any speech, essay or letter by Guevara.

Jay Cantor, novelist Likely origin

The line appears, in parentheses, in the narration of Cantor’s 1983 novel The Death of Che Guevara ↗, as “silence is argument carried on by other means.” The book is a work of fiction, so the sentence belongs to Cantor’s narrator, not to Guevara.

Robert Byrne, quote anthologist Earliest Che credit found

Byrne’s 1986 collection The Third and Possibly the Best 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said ↗ gives it to Guevara with no citation. Byrne’s later omnibus editions and many 1990s–2000s quote books then repeated it.

Che Guevara did not write or say this. The earliest version we found is Jay Cantor’s, in his 1983 novel The Death of Che Guevara ↗, where it reads “carried on by other means.”

Context

A novel’s line gets misread as Guevara’s own

Jay Cantor’s The Death of Che Guevara is a long novel that imagines Guevara’s life and death. In one scene the narrator describes a man whose arrival silences a chattering group, and adds in parentheses: “silence is argument carried on by other means.” Lifted out of the book, the sentence reads like a maxim, and the book’s title supplies a famous name to hang it on.

By 1986 Robert Byrne’s quote anthology was crediting it to Guevara outright. From there it spread through quote dictionaries, textbooks and email signatures. Along the way “carried on” drifted into “carried out,” the wording most sites use today.

His silence was another manner of argument.

Limits of this search

“Earliest” here means the earliest we found in the Internet Archive’s full-text search of digitized books. We could not run a matching Google Books search, so an earlier printing can’t be ruled out.

The novel’s copyright page also lists 1977 and 1979, so parts of it may have appeared in print before 1983. We have not checked whether this sentence was in those earlier parts.

Quote Investigator has no article on this quote or on Guevara; searches of its site return nothing.

Explore

Filed under

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

Power Truth

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.

Che Guevara — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Lists the line, citing only a 2005 self-help compilation, not a Guevara text
The Death of Che Guevara: A Novel (1983)archive.org

Catalog record and lending scan of Jay Cantor’s Knopf novel, where the earliest wording appears
The Third and Possibly the Best 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (1986)archive.org

Robert Byrne’s anthology, the earliest found to credit the line to Guevara
Jay Cantor — Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

Background on the novelist, listing The Death of Che Guevara (Knopf, 1983)
Che Guevara Archivemarxists.org

Guevara’s actual speeches and writings in English, to check any quote against

The novelist behind the line

Who actually wrote it

Jay Cantor

born 1948 · American novelist and essayist

Jay Cantor is an American novelist and essayist who teaches at Tufts University. His first novel, The Death of Che Guevara (Knopf, 1983), is a work of fiction that imagines Guevara’s life and death. Its narration contains the earliest version of this line we could find.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest appearance found

Jay Cantor, The Death of Che Guevara: A Novel (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), worded “silence is argument carried on by other means.” Earliest credited to Guevara in Robert Byrne, The Third and Possibly the Best 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (1986), no. 590.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Silence is argument carried out by other means’?” Last verified 2 Nov 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/silence-is-argument-carried-out-by-other-means/

Something wrong on this page?

Tell us what’s off. A link helps but isn’t required — “this is the wrong person” is a useful report on its own. Nothing here changes the page directly; it goes to our review queue and a human checks it.

Only used to tell you if we act on your report. We never sell or share it.

Copied