Memorable quotes for
The Mission (1986) More at IMDbPro »

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.
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Gabriel: 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.
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Cabeza: I cannot and will not accept a challenge from a priest. His cloth protects him.
Mendoza: My cloth protects *you*!
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[Last Lines]
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.
[/spoiler]
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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.
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Altamirano: [to Cabeza and Hontar] And you have the effrontery to tell me that this slaughter was necessary?
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Mendoza: 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, I thought 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.
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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.
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Mendoza: For me there 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?
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[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.
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Gabriel: We are not the members of a democracy, Father. We are the members of an order.
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Altamirano: 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.
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Altamirano: With an orchestra, the Jesuits could have subdued the entire continent.
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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.
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Mendoza: Leave me alone. You know what I am.
Gabriel: Yes. You are a mercenary. You are a slave trader. And you killed your brother. I know. And you loved him... although you chose a strange way to show it.
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Fielding: Father, he's done this penance long enough, and well, the other brothers think the same.
Gabriel: But he doesn't think so, John. Until he does, neither do I.
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Altamirano: The Garden of Eden!
Gabriel: It's a trifle overgrown.
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