Jody Williams Quotes

Land mines distinguish themselves because once they have been sown, once the soldier walks away from the weapon, the land mine 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. The crux of the problem is that while the use of the weapon might be militarily justifiable during the day of the battle, or even the two weeks of the battle, or maybe even the two months of the battle, once peace is declared the land mine does not recognize that peace. The land mine is eternally prepared to take victims. In common parlance, it is the perfect soldier, the eternal sentry. The war ends; the land mine goes on killing.

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.

Since World War II, most of the conflicts in the world have been internal conflicts. The weapon of choice in those wars has all too often been landmines - to such a degree that what we find today are tens of millions of landmines contaminating approximately 70 countries around the world.

The real trouble with war (modern war) is that it gives no one a chance to kill the right people.

Once a conflict has dragged on for a decade, most people are tired of war - and the troubles that flow from it.

Even soldiers from the Vietnam War had said that when they were fighting in that war, the landmine was just one of any number of weapons to use in the fighting. It wasn't until they began to think about the aftermath and the legacy of landmines that they recognized the long-term, indiscriminate impact of the weapon.

Guns go home with the soldiers, but landmines are designed to kill - mindlessly, out of control, for years.

There are still thousands of people dying every year in Laos, mostly children and farmers, from unexploded anti-personnel ordnance that the U.S. simply saturated much of the land with, especially in the Plain of Jars. There actually is a British engineering team trying to remove some of these things, which are much worse than land mines.

The world is too little aware of the waste of life, limb and land which anti-personnel landmines are causing among some of the poorest people on earth.

The devastation wreaked by landmines is not only horrendous but immoral

Millions of people in nearly 80 countries still live in fear of landmines and explosive remnants of war, which take an unacceptable toll on lives and limbs, and people's livelihoods

Every day women and children are killed and maimed by landmines long after wars are over.

Landmines are among the most barbaric weapons of war, because they continue to kill and maim innocent people long after the war itself has ended. Also, fear of them keeps people off the land, and thus prevents them from growing food.

The statistics of mines that need clearance are staggering but the truth is it's a challenge that is absolutely doable.

The fact that you had disruptions in the peace process was not only in Rwanda. We had the same problem in Cambodia, we had the same problem in Mozambique, we had the same problem in Salvador.

Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total... because it may well involve the whole world.

You know what I had a problem with? The war - the war in Afghanistan.

We in the West walked away from Afghanistan at the end of the Cold War and left it as a country devastated socially and armed to the teeth. If we do that again, there will be consequences.

Unfortunately, in war, there are casualties, including among the civilian population.

I don’t care how precise your bombs and weapons of war are. When you set them off, innocent people will die.

War hath no fury like a noncombatant.

Ground combat almost always kills more civilians than drone strikes do.

Except when war is waged in a desert, noncombatants, also known as civilians or "the people," constitute the great majority of those affected.

There is no denying that the interventionist wars in Iraq and Libya that were propagated as necessary to relieve human suffering actually increased human suffering in those countries - many times over.

We are at war and, like it or not, that is a fact. It is not Bush's war, and it is not Obama's war. It is our war, and we can't run away from it.