John Smith Quotes
c. January 1580 – June 21, 1631
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The opportunity to serve our country—that is all we ask.
Speech to Labour Party fund-raising dinner, May 11, 1994 (the night before his death). 
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More John Smith Quotes
The settled will of the Scottish people.
John Smith— 1994 Of the creation of a Scottish parliament, in a speech at the Scottish Labour Conference,11 Mar.
We will do our best to reward your faith in us, but please give us the opportunity to serve our country, that is all we ask.
John Smith— Address to a European Gala Dinner, 11 May 1994. They were his final public words; he died the next morning of a heart attack.
Heaven & earth never agreed better to frame a place for man's habitation; were it fully manured and inhabited by industrious people. Here are mountaines, hils, plaines, valleyes, rivers, and brookes, all running most pleasantly into a faire Bay, compassed but for the mouth, with fruitfull and delightsome land.
John Smith— Describing the countryside around Chesapeake Bay (1606); reported in The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England & The Summer Isles (1907), vol. 2, pp. 44–45.
You must obey this now for a Law, that he that will not worke shall not eate (except by sicknesse he be disabled:) for the labours of thirtie or fortie honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintaine an hundred and fiftie idle loyterers.
John Smith— Advice to his company when he was governor of Jamestown Colony, Virginia (1608); reported in The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England & The Summer Isles (1907), vol. 1, chapter 10, p. 174.
If it is the case that one Department of this Government deliberately organised a leak to frustrate a Minister in the same Government, that is not only dirty tricks but a habit that is inimical to the practice of good government in this country.
John Smith— Hansard, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 89, col. 1157.
— Speech on the Westland affair, 15 January 1986.
In the course of a few weeks the one policy with which the Prime Minister was uniquely and personally associated, the contribution to policy of which he appears to have been most proud, has been blown apart, and with it has gone for ever any claim by the Prime Minister or the party that he leads to economic competence. He is the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government.
John Smith— Hansard, House of Commons, 6th series, vol. 212, col. 22.
— House of Commons speech, September 24, 1992, referring to Black Wednesday.
