UVA EText Jefferson Digital Archive: Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, Thomas Jefferson on Politics and Government, Texts by or to Thomas Jefferson from the Modern English Collection
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
↑ Ken Schoolland, The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible: A Free Market Odyssey (Cape Town, South Africa: Leap Publishing, 2004), 235. PDF version available online.
↑ 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.
Li Zhao Schoolland is the Founder of TFT Events which has organized successful Austrian Economics Conferences and Summer camps since 2010 in China, Slovakia, Romania, Indonesia, and Morocco. She is a columnist writing a weekly column in China on child-rearing and has given talks about individual liberty at numerous international conferences and summer camps in Mongolia, China, USA, Ukraine, Japan, Malaysia, India, and the Republic of Georgia. Through TFT Events, Li has arranged for the Chinese translation and publication of works by Jesus Huerta de Soto, Michael Oliver, Doug Casey, Ken Schoolland, The Acton Institute, and Jeffrey Tucker.
Li was a high school and university teacher for many years in Hawaii, Minnesota, and China. She served as the youth director of Chinese Lutheran Church of Honolulu and was the manager of several businesses in China and Hawaii. She has two masters degrees: one in Japanese Business Studies from Chaminade University of Honolulu and one in Japanese Literature from the University of Minnesota. Li is fluent in Mandarin, Japanese, and English.
