The democracy will cease to exist...(Quotation)

From Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia

Quotation: "The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not."

Variations: None known.

Sources consulted: Searching on the phrase "democracy will cease to exist" and "willing to work"

  1. Monticello website
  2. Ford's Works of Thomas Jefferson
  3. L&B (CD-ROM version)
  4. UVA EText Jefferson Digital Archive: Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, Thomas Jefferson on Politics and Government, Texts by or to Thomas Jefferson from the Modern English Collection
  5. Thomas Jefferson Retirement Papers
  6. Quotable Jefferson (searching in the index under "democracy" and "work")


Earliest known appearance in print: 1986[1][2]

Earliest known appearance in print, attributed to Jefferson: See above.

Other attributions: None known.

Status: This exact quotation has not been found in any of the writings of Thomas Jefferson. It bears a very vague resemblance to Jefferson's comment in a prospectus for his translation of Destutt de Tracy's Treatise on Political Economy: "To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, ‘the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, & the fruits acquired by it.'"[3]

Footnotes

  1. ↑ John Galt, Dreams Come Due: Government and Economics as if Freedom Mattered] (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 312.
  2. ↑ To establish the earliest appearance of this phrase in print, the following sources were searched for the phrase, "democracy will cease to exist" and "willing to work": 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, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, 19th Century U.S. Newspapers, American Periodicals Series Online, JSTOR.
  3. ↑ L&B 14:446.

Further Sources

Retrieved from "http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/The_democracy_will_cease_to_exist...%28Quotation%29"