For years, a rumor has circulated online that former U.S. President Thomas Jefferson said: "When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty."
Some social media users shared the quote with Jefferson's name in early 2025 to express their dissatisfaction with President Donald Trump's second administration. It appeared on X, Bluesky, Facebook, Threads and TikTok. Reddit users also attributed the quote to the founding father in previous months and years.
While it is possible Jefferson might have agreed with the quote, it was not possible to find any documented record of him ever producing it in written or verbal form.
In 2013, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation wrote on its website, Monticello.org, that the quote was "spurious." At the time, the foundation said the oldest example it found of the quote being attributed to the former president was from a book published in 2006. Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, the same day as former President John Adams. Genuine quotations from prominent historical figures typically don't debut 180 years after their deaths.
Anna Berkes, a manager for public services and collections development at the foundation, wrote in 2013: "This statement has not been found in Thomas Jefferson's writings, although it captures some of the ideas that Jefferson expressed in the Declaration of Independence, e.g. '...when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government...'"
The foundation had not responded to a request for further comment at the time of publication.
Possible origins of the quote
A mid-March 2025 search of Google Books — a website that chronicles searchable text in literary works through the centuries — found no books published prior to 2011 featuring the quote with Jefferson's name. The 2006 book, sourced by Berkes in 2013, no longer appeared on the Google Books website in 2025.
Other social media users attributed the in-question quote to former South African President Nelson Mandela and late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. However, once again, they provided no evidence that either person originated the quote.
Barry Popik — an etymologist and contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary — arrived at similar findings in a 2012 blog post. His article said the quote had been used numerous times without being connected to Jefferson, such as in West Germany in 1979 and Australia in 1983.
A 1979 print issue of U.K. publication The Ecologist also credited the phrase to the late Auckland activist Penny Bright, who said: "When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty." Google Books' partially obscured preview of the print issue displayed the subsequent text: "If you plant it, we'll pull it." However, it was not entirely clear if Bright had said that.
Popik shared variations of the fake Jefferson quote also presented by internet users without evidence, reading: "When injustice is law, rebellion is duty" and "When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty."
For further reading, previous Snopes fact checks also focusing on purported Jefferson quotations included: "The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it," as well as: "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."