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.
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.
[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. ...
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...
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.
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?
Altamirano: With an orchestra, the Jesuits could have subdued the entire continent.
Altamirano: [to Cabeza and Hontar] And you have the effrontery to tell me that this slaughter was necessary?
[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.
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.
Altamirano: What was your income last year? Jesuit: Last year, 120,000 escudos. Altamirano: And how was it distributed? Jesuit: It is shared among them equally. This is a community. Altamirano: Ah yes, there is a French radical group that teaches tha...
Sebastian: Your Christian community is commercially competitive. Altamirano: Yes. It's very prosperous. Isn't that precisely why you want to take it over? Sebastian: No. You should've achieved a noble failure if you wanted the state's approval. There...
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.
Gabriel: We are not the members of a democracy, Father. We are the members of an order.
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.
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.
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.
Altamirano: The Garden of Eden! Gabriel: It's a trifle overgrown.
