Democracy is nothing more than mob rule

From Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia

Quotation: "Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%."

Variations:

  1. "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51 percent of the people may take away the rights of the other 49."
  2. "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine."

Sources consulted: Searching on the phrase "mob rule"

  1. Monticello website
  2. Ford's Works of Thomas Jefferson
  3. UVA EText Jefferson Digital Archive: Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, Thomas Jefferson on Politics and Government, Texts by or to Thomas Jefferson from the Modern English Collection
  4. Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress
  5. Retirement Papers
  6. Quotable Jefferson
  7. Bartleby.com: Quotations

Earliest known appearance in print: 2005[1][2][3]

Other attributions: None known.

Status: We currently have no evidence to confirm that Thomas Jefferson ever said or wrote, "Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%" or any of its listed variations. We do not know the source of this statement's attribution to Thomas Jefferson.

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Ken Schoolland, The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible: A Free Market Odyssey (Academic Foundation, 2005), 232.
  2. ↑ J. Thompson, "Powers v. Harris: How the Tenth Circuit Buried Economic Liberties," Denver University Law Review 82 (2005): 585. Thompson cites http://www.wisdomquotes.com/cat_democracy.html, visited 31 March 2005; the website contains no citation to any Jefferson document.
  3. ↑ To establish the earliest appearance of this phrase in print, the following sources were searched for the phrase, "democracy is nothing more than mob rule": Google Books, Google Scholar, Amazon.com, Internet Archive, America's Historical Newspapers, American Broadsides and Ephemera Series I, Early American Imprints Series I and II, Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, 19th Century U.S. Newspapers, American Periodicals Series Online, JSTOR.

Further Sources

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