Quotes Thomas Jefferson did not say...

Portrait of President Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) by Revolutionary War hero Tadeusz Kosciuszko (1746-1817)

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."

Earliest known appearance in print: 2004^[1][2]

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 (Cape Town, South Africa: Leap Publishing, 2004), 235. PDF version available online.
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.

For further information see the Monticello website here.