JOHN SMITH

A very goodly Bay … that may have the prerogative over the most pleasant places of Europe, Asia, Africa or America for large and pleasant navigable rivers. Heaven and Earth have never agreed better to frame a place for man’s habitation.

New England

God will so assist us, that if you dare stand but to discharge your pieces, the very smoake will bee sufficient to affright them… They are naked and cowardly ... people, who dare not stand the presenting of a staffe ... or peece, nor an uncharged peece in the hands of a woman.

For richest Jems and gainfull things most Merchants wisely venter; Deride not then New England men, this Corporation enter;

As Geography without History seemeth a carkasse without motion; so History without Geography wandreth as a Vagrant without a certaine habitation.

This dear bought Land with so much blood and cost, hath only made some few rich, and all the rest losers.

Fatherless children were left in little better condition than slaves, for if their Parents die in debt, their children are made bondmen till the debt be discharged.

Your aim's as bad as your cooking sweetheart... and that's saying something!

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.

The pain of preparation is nothing like the pain of losing.

I sometimes think that when the prime minister tries to select a weapon it is the boomerang he finds most effective.

Everything of worth is found full of difficulties.

The attitude, and the mind, is where it all starts.

The settled will of the Scottish people.

But our comedies never endured long without a tragedy.

Why should the brave Spanish soldiers brag? The sunne never sets in the Spanish dominions, but ever shineth on one part or other we have conquered for our king.

Had we been as free from all sins as we were from gluttony and drunkenness we might have been canonized for saints.

There is a twofold meaning in every creature, a literal and a mystical, and the one is but the ground of the other.

To seek Divinity merely in books is to seek the living among the dead... seek God within your own soul.

History is the memory of time, the life of the dead and the happiness of the living.

Win or lose you will never regret working hard, making sacrifices, being disciplined or focusing too much. Success is measured by what we have done to prepare for competition.

When our people were fed out of the common store, and laboured jointly together, glad was he could slip from his labour, or slumber over his taske he cared not how, nay, the most honest among them would hardly take so much true paines in a weeke, as now for themselves they will doe in a day: neither cared they for the increase, presuming that howsoever the harvest prospered, the generall store must maintaine them, so that wee reaped not so much Corne from the labours of thirtie, as now three or foure doe provide for themselves.

With this lodging and diet our extreme toil in bearing and planting palisades so strained and bruised us and our continual labor in the extremity of the heat had so weakened us, as were cause sufficient to have made us as miserable in our native country or any other place in the world

How comes it to pass, if they be only moved by chance and accident, that such regular mutations and generations should be begotten by a fortuitous concourse of atoms.

Here every man may be master and owner of his owne labour and land...If he have nothing but his hands, he may...by industrie quickly grow rich.