Landmines distinguish themselves because once they have been sown, once the soldier walks away from the weapon, the landmine cannot tell the difference between a soldier or a civilian - a woman, a child, a grandmother going out to collect firewood to make the family meal.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the indiscriminate nature of landmines and the tragedies they cause to innocent lives.
Jody Williams emphasizes the tragic reality of landmines, which do not differentiate between combatants and non-combatants. Once set, these weapons pose a persistent threat, potentially endangering civilians like women and children, thereby illustrating a broader commentary on the consequences of war and the indiscriminate suffering it inflicts on society.
In practice
In a speech about the impact of war on civilians, this quote can highlight the ongoing dangers posed by unexploded ordnance.
I think thereβs a mythology that if you want to change the world, you have to be sainted, like Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela or Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Ordinary people with lives that go up and down and around in circles can still contribute to change.
I believe that worrying about the problems plaguing our planet without taking steps to confront them is absolutely irrelevant. The only thing that changes this world is taking action.
Guns go home with the soldiers, but landmines are designed to kill - mindlessly, out of control, for years.
What I consider to be peace [is] a sustainable peace in which the majority of people on this planet have access to enough resources to live dignified lives.
This is a country that was founded on racism. It was built on racism. It still continues to thrive through wealth disparity, and housing disparity is all built on the backs of racism.
There are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal.
To say that God's sovereignty is limited by man's freedom is to make man sovereign.
No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.
We make choices. No one else can live our lives for us. And we must confront and accept the consequences of our actions.
Small rooms or dwellings set the mind in the right path, large ones cause it to go astray.
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