Love Quote by Hernando Cortez

A conquistador’s confession dressed up as folk wisdom: Cortez frames greed not as vice but as diagnosis. Calling it “a sickness of the heart” borrows the language of morality and medicine, then flips it. If the ailment lives in the heart - the seat of conscience - the cure being “only gold” turns conscience itself into a market. It’s an alibi that arrives sounding like honesty.

The specific intent is pragmatic persuasion. Cortez isn’t just admitting hunger for wealth; he’s normalizing it as an inevitable condition “we Spaniards” share. That collective “we” recruits the listener into complicity, smoothing over the moral violence that extraction requires. Gold becomes less a spoil than a prescribed remedy, an argument ready-made for soldiers, investors, and a Crown that demanded returns.

The subtext is colder: spirituality is negotiable when profit is at stake. Cortez came from a Spain fresh from the Reconquista, steeped in crusading rhetoric and imperial ambition, where conversion and conquest often traveled together. His line quietly demotes religious purpose to branding. You can still talk about God and glory, but the real pathology - the engine of empire - is desire, and desire has a single medicine.

Context sharpens the cynicism. In the Americas, “gold” wasn’t abstract; it was seized through alliances, coercion, and catastrophe. By medicalizing greed, Cortez makes exploitation sound like treatment. The brilliance is how it shrinks accountability: if gold is the cure, then taking it becomes not merely justified but necessary.