Altamirano quotes from The Mission (1986)

View Quote [to Cabeza and Hontar] And you have the effrontery to tell me that this slaughter was necessary?

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

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.

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 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 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.