The Mission (1986) quotes

View Quote Altamirano: Tell them they must leave the missions. They must submit to the will of God.
Gabriel: They say it was the will of God that they came out of the jungle and built the mission. They don't understand why God has changed his mind.

View Quote Altamirano: [spoiler] So, your Holiness. Now your priests are dead, and I am left alive. But in truth it is I who am dead, and they who live. For as always, your Holiness. The spirit of the dead will survive in the memory of the living.

View Quote Cabeza: I cannot and will not accept a challenge from a priest. His cloth protects him.
Mendoza: My cloth protects *you*!

View Quote Gabriel: So you're hunting above the falls now, Captain Mendoza?
[pauses]
Gabriel: We're building a mission here. We're going to make Christians of these people!
Mendoza: If you have the time.

View Quote Hontar: We must work in the world, your eminence. The world is thus.
Altamirano: No, Señor Hontar. Thus have we made the world... thus have I made it.

View Quote Mendoza: Are you laughing at me?
Gabriel: I am laughing because what I see is laughable. I see a coward, a man running from the world.

View Quote Mendoza: For me these is no redemption, no penance great enough.
Gabriel: There is. But do you dare to try it?
Mendoza: Do you dare to see it fail?

View Quote Portuguese Soldier: [Upon seeing the mission, and hearing the Guaraní singing during mass] None of us wants to do this.
Portuguese Commander: [On the verge of crying] I'm not interested. Take your position!

View Quote [Mendoza is repeatedly dragging a load of armor up a cliff as penance for killing his brother]
Fielding: How long must he carry that stupid thing?
Gabriel: God knows.

View Quote If might is right, then love has no place in the world. It may be so, it may be so. But I don't have the strength to live in a world like that, Rodrigo.

View Quote If you die with blood in your hands, Rodrigo, then you betray everything we have done! You promised your life to God! AND GOD IS LOVE!

View Quote We are not the members of a democracy, Father. We are the members of an order.

View Quote With an orchestra, the Jesuits could have subdued the entire continent.

View Quote Your Holiness, a surgeon to save the body must often hack off a limb. But in truth nothing could prepare me for the beauty and the power of the limb that I had come here to sever.

View Quote [paraphrasing 1 Corinthians 13] Though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains and have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor and though I give my body to be burned and have not love, it profiteth me nothing. Love suffereth and love is kind. Love envieth not. Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things. But now abideth faith, hope, love... these three. But the greatest of these is love.