Skip to content

You must obey this now for a Law, that he that will not work shall not eat (except by sickness he be disabled:) for the labors of thirty or forty honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintain a hundred and fifty idle loiterers.

Another quote →

More quotes by John Smith

Nothing would be done for a plantation, till about some hundred of your Brownists of England, Amsterdam, and Leyden went to New Plimouth, whose humorous ignorances caused them for more than a year, to endure a wonderful deal of misery, with infinite patience.

Heaven &earth never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation; were it fully manured and inhabited by industrious people. Here are mountains, hills, plains, valleys, rivers, and brookes, all running most nicely into a faire Bay, compassed but for the mouth, with fruitful and delightsome land.

Describing the countryside around Chesapeake Bay (1606)

At last, upon those inducements, some well-disposed Brownists, as they are termed, with some Gentlemen and Merchants of Layden and Amsterdam, to save charges would try their own conclusions, though with great loss and much misery till time had taught them to see their own error; for such humorists will never believe well, till they bee beaten with their own rod.

All John Smith quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John Smith (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.