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Democracy is nothing more than mob rule...(Spurious Quotation)
Quotation: "Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%."
Variations:
- "A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51 percent of the people may take away the rights of the other 49."
- "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"
- Monticello website
- Ford's Works of Thomas Jefferson
- UVA EText Jefferson Digital Archive: Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, Thomas Jefferson on Politics and Government, Texts by or to Thomas Jefferson from the Modern English Collection
- Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress
- Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series
- Quotable Jefferson
- Bartleby.com: Quotations
Earliest known appearance in print: 200412
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.
Further Sources
- UVA EText Jefferson Digital Archive: Thomas Jefferson on Politics and Government. "Majority Rule." http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff0500.htm
- 1. Ken Schoolland, The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible: A Free Market Odyssey (Cape Town, South Africa: Leap Publishing, 2004), 235.
- 2. 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.
Filed In:
Spurious Quotations