Saving Private Ryan

The mission is a man.

"Be not that far from me, for trouble is near; haste Thee to help me."

    --  Private Jackson
 

"Seems to me, Cap'n, this mission is a serious misallocation of valuable military resources."

    --  Private Jackson
 

"You want to explain the math of this to me? I mean, where's the sense in risking the lives of the eight of us to save one guy?"
"Anyone wanna answer that?"
"Hey, think about the poor bastard's mother."
"Hey, Wade, I got a mother, you got a mother, the sarge has got a mother. I'm willing to bet that even the Captain's got a mother. Well, maybe not the Captain, but the rest of us have got mothers."

    --  Private Reiben, Medic Wade and Captain John Miller
 

"I got a bad feeling about this one."
"When was the last time you felt good about anything?"

    --  Private Reiben and Captain John Miller
 

"It's like finding a needle in a stack of needles."

    --  Captain John Miller
 

"He better be worth it. He better go home and cure a disease, or invent a longer-lasting light bulb."

    --  Captain John Miller
 

"You see, when... when you end up killing one your men, you see, you tell yourself it happened so you could save the lives of two or three or ten others. Maybe a hundred others. Do you know how many men I've lost under my command?"
"How many?"
"Ninety-four. But that means I've saved the lives of ten times that many, doesn't it? Maybe even 20, right? Twenty times as many? And that's how simple it is. That's how you... that's how you rationalize making the choice between the mission and the man."

    --  Captain John Miller and Sergeant Horvath
 

"I just know that every man I kill, the farther away from home I feel."

    --  Captain John Miller
 

"I don't know. Part of me thinks the kid's right. He asks what he's done to deserve this. He wants to stay here, fine. Let's leave him and go home. But then another part of me thinks, what if by some miracle we stay, then actually make it out of here. Someday we might look back on this and decide that saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole godawful mess. Like you said, Captain, maybe we do that, we all earn the right to go home."

    --  Sergeant Horvath
 

"James... I'm here to tell you your brothers were killed in combat. They're dead."
"Which one, sir?"
"All of them."

    --  Captain John Miller and Private Ryan
 

"You can tell her that when you found me, I was with the only brothers I had left. And that there was no way I was deserting them. I think she'd understand that."

    --  Private Ryan

"Hey asshole! Two of our guys died trying to find you all right?"

    --  Private Reiben
 

"Earn this."

    --  Captain John Miller