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

Who really said it

We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us

Not Lenin — a Cold War attribution with no source No verified speaker Credited to Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), Russian revolutionary and first head of the Soviet state
Disputed Rights unconfirmed

The sentence appears nowhere in Lenin’s collected writings, and Wikiquote files it under Misattributed. The earliest strong match Quote Investigator has located is a freestanding filler item in The Commonwealth of 31 October 1955 — thirty-one years after Lenin’s death — which credits him with a differently worded version on the sole authority of Major George Racey Jordan, an American anti-communist campaigner, and gives no work, date or occasion.

Last verified 9 Sep 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us” not Vladimir Lenin. The sentence appears nowhere in his works; Wikiquote files it under Misattributed, and Quote Investigator's earliest strong match is a filler item in The Commonwealth of 31 October 1955, crediting Lenin via Major George Racey Jordan and naming no source — thirty-one years after Lenin died. — Quotle.info

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

Can you use it?

We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.

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

In context

Evoking the themes of power, doubt and justice. Theme: "We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us". 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 "We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us". 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

The trail stops in 1955, not in Lenin

Earliest strong match (Quote Investigator)
The Commonwealth: Official Journal of the Commonwealth Club of California
Published
31 October 1955, vol. 31 no. 44, p. 268 — credited to Lenin by Major George Racey Jordan, with no source given
In Lenin’s own works
Not found. The nearest genuine text is “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, written April–May 1920 and issued as a pamphlet that June, whose rope image is about British politicians rather than capitalists
Translation
That 1920 passage is quoted in English from Julius Katzer’s rendering in Collected Works vol. 31 (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964)

Lenin wrote, “When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will vie with each other for the rope contract.” —Major George Racey Jordan Earliest strong match, 1955

That is the whole of it: a freestanding filler item in The Commonwealth of 31 October 1955, verified from scans by Quote Investigator. It is not the modern wording, it names no work, date or occasion, and it appeared thirty-one years after Lenin’s death in January 1924.

Quote Investigator: the full chronology, 1896 to 2007

The paper trail, in order

  • June 1920 — Lenin publishes “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, in which he says he wants to support the Labour politician Henderson “in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man”. The rope stands for a tactical vote in a British election, and nobody sells anything (Marxists Internet Archive ↗).
  • 26 March 1924 — two months after Lenin’s death, Lord Emmott tells the House of Lords that Grigory Zinoviev had said the Bolsheviks should support the British Labour Party “as the rope ‘supports’ the man who hangs himself” — the same image, from a different Bolshevik (Quote Investigator ↗).
  • 31 October 1955 — the earliest strong match Quote Investigator has located: a filler line in The Commonwealth crediting Lenin with “When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will vie with each other for the rope contract”, sourced only to Major George Racey Jordan (Quote Investigator ↗).
  • 30 June 1975 — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, speaking in Washington, tells it as an anecdote: Lenin promising “we will give a rope to the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie will hang itself with this rope”, and Karl Radek asking where they will get enough rope. QI notes it does not know how Solzhenitsyn acquired the story (Quote Investigator ↗).

The famous wording has no identified author, no original work and no first-publication date, so no copyright status can honestly be asserted for it. The nearest genuine Lenin text — “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder, written April–May 1920 and issued as a pamphlet that June — is long out of copyright in its Russian original, but the standard English wording of that passage comes from Julius Katzer’s translation in the 1964 Progress Publishers Collected Works, a modern rendering whose own status is separate.

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

A Cold War quotation in search of an author

Three versions circulate — ‘the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them’, ‘when it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will sell us the rope’, and ‘the last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope’ — pinned variously on Lenin, Stalin and Marx. None of the three has ever been traced to any of them.

Vladimir Lenin Misattributed

Wikiquote ↗ files this exact sentence under Misattributed, citing They Never Said It (p. 64) for the finding that there is no evidence Lenin said it, and suggests it may derive as a confused paraphrase of a genuine 1920 passage in which the rope supports a hanged man and no one sells anything.

Major George Racey Jordan, 1955 No source

Jordan was a US Army Air Corps Lend-Lease control officer who became a public anti-communist after testifying to Congress in 1949 (Wikipedia ↗). The filler item carrying his name in The Commonwealth of 31 October 1955 names no work, date or occasion for the alleged remark (Quote Investigator ↗).

Joseph Stalin No evidence

Senator Barry Goldwater’s 1979 memoir With No Apologies gave the line to Stalin, hedged as something he said ‘to this effect’. Quote Investigator finds no substantive evidence for the Stalin attribution (Quote Investigator ↗).

Karl Marx No evidence

A fund manager testifying before a US Senate committee in 2007 attributed ‘the last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope’ to Marx and Lenin together. QI finds no substantive evidence for Marx either (Quote Investigator ↗).

Best available verdict: a Cold War coinage with no author. The Austrian quotation researcher Gerald Krieghofer finds no digitised text in German, English or Russian before 1950 in which the line appears as a Lenin quote, and calls it an invention of the Cold War era (Zitatforschung ↗), while Quote Investigator calls the evidence linking the saying to Lenin weak because the first citation appeared in 1955, many years after his death in 1924 (Quote Investigator ↗).

Context

How a slogan outran its source

The line earned its fame as an argument, not as a quotation. From the late 1950s it was deployed in American debates over trade with the Soviet bloc: if Lenin himself had predicted that capitalists would sell the Communists the means of their own destruction, every export licence became evidence for the prosecution. Quote Investigator records it in a syndicated Victor Riesel column on 12 January 1959, in a congressional hearing on 29 January 1959 where Representative Walter H. Judd ascribed it to Lenin, and in a letter to Aviation Week and Space Technology that May.

What keeps it alive is that the underlying thought is not absurd. A passage attributed to Lenin by the memoirist I. U. Annenkov, printed in the émigré journal Novyi Zhurnal in September 1961 and later logged by the Congressional Research Service, has capitalists furnishing credits and equipment and thereby working “on the preparation of their own suicide”. That is the same idea — but it reached print thirty-seven years after Lenin died, in a wording whose only warrant is Annenkov’s own account of examining Lenin’s manuscripts in 1924, and it contains no rope.

The trail runs backwards through Cold War pamphleteering, not forwards from anything Lenin wrote.

The older proverb underneath it

Long before any Bolshevik, English had ‘give a man enough rope and he will hang himself’ — a proverb of the mid-17th century in which nobody sells the rope. Quote Investigator traces socialist uses of the image through Samuel E. Keeble’s Industrial Day-Dreams (1896), which argued that capitalism, ‘by giving it rope enough’, would hang itself, and through the 1901 proceedings of the Socialist Labor Party’s tenth national convention, where delegate Thomas Curran spoke of weaving ‘a rope with which we will hang the capitalist class’.

The closest pre-1955 match is not about Lenin at all. A profile of the Soviet diplomat Maxim Litvinov by S. Dmitrijewski in the Review of Reviews of July 1931 described millionaires financing a Bolshevik newspaper in 1905 and thereby helping to ‘weave the rope from which many of them should hang later on’ — the meaning of the saying, decades before anyone put it in Lenin’s mouth.

Explore

Filed under

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

Power Doubt Justice

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.

Quote Origin: The Capitalists Will Sell Us the Rope with Which We Will Hang Themquoteinvestigator.com

The definitive chronology, 1896 to 2007: the 1955 Commonwealth filler item, the Riesel and Judd citations of 1959, Solzhenitsyn’s 1975 anecdote, and the conclusion that the evidence linking the saying to Lenin is weak.
Vladimir Lenin — Misattributeden.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote files this exact wording under Misattributed, cites They Never Said It (p. 64), and prints the genuine 1920 ‘rope supports a hanged man’ passage for comparison.
“Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder — section 9www.marxists.org

The real Lenin rope metaphor, in the section on Great Britain: he will support Henderson “in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man”.
“Left-Wing” Communism — publication detailswww.marxists.org

Front matter for the pamphlet: written April–May 1920, first published as a pamphlet in June 1920, English translation by Julius Katzer from Collected Works vol. 31 (Progress Publishers, 1964).
Zitatforschung: “Die Kapitalisten werden uns noch den Strick verkaufen…”falschzitate.blogspot.com

Gerald Krieghofer’s independent German-language dossier: no digitised text in German, English or Russian before 1950 in which the line appears as a Lenin quote, a documented evolution from a 1958 anecdote, and a verdict of Cold War invention.
George Racey Jordanen.wikipedia.org

Biography of the man behind the 1955 attribution: a US Army Air Corps Lend-Lease control officer (1898–1966) who became nationally known for his 1949 congressional testimony about wartime deliveries to the USSR.

Popularly credited author

Why it gets pinned on Lenin

Vladimir Lenin

1870–1924 · Russian revolutionary, first head of the Soviet state

Vladimir Lenin led the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 and headed Soviet Russia until his death in January 1924, and he attracts manufactured quotations more reliably than almost any modern figure — a cynical line about capitalist greed sounds like him, and few English readers can check fifty-five volumes of Russian to find out. He did write a rope metaphor: in “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder (1920) he says he wants to back the British Labour politician Henderson “in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man” — but that is about a tactical vote in a British election, and nobody in it sells anything. Nothing resembling the rope-selling sentence has been found in his published work.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented appearance

Earliest strong match located by Quote Investigator: “The Commonwealth: Official Journal of the Commonwealth Club of California,” vol. 31, no. 44 (31 October 1955): 268 — a filler item crediting Lenin with “When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will vie with each other for the rope contract,” on the authority of Major George Racey Jordan and with no source given. See Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: The Capitalists Will Sell Us the Rope with Which We Will Hang Them,” 22 February 2018. Attribution to Lenin unverified; Wikiquote files the sentence under Misattributed.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us’?” Last verified 9 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/we-will-hang-the-capitalists-with-the-rope-that-they-sell-us/

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