Daily Inspiration Quote by Mohsen Makhmalbaf

Numbers are doing double duty here: they inform, and they indict. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, speaking as a filmmaker, isn’t reaching for poetic abstraction; he’s staging a moral close-up. The opening question pulls the listener into complicity. If you didn’t know, you’re implicated in the machinery that lets this stay background noise. If you did know, the question still needles: what have you done with that knowledge?

The statistic is blunt on purpose, then the time horizon turns it into something uglier than tragedy: bureaucracy. “It will continue for the next 50 years” reframes landmines from a leftover of war into a system that reliably manufactures civilians-as-casualties long after the cameras have moved on. The subtext is that the war isn’t over when armies leave; it metastasizes into soil, into childhood, into agriculture, into ordinary walking. A landmine is the perfect metaphor for the modern attention economy: hidden, delayed, and punishing to the unsuspecting.

Context matters. Makhmalbaf emerged from revolutionary Iran, then became one of the region’s most internationally visible directors, often treating cinema as a form of witness when official narratives fail. In that light, the quote functions like an elevator pitch for why art has to keep returning to places the world has decided are “resolved.” The line about Afghanistan having “the largest number” isn’t just a fact; it’s a rebuke to global triage. Some countries get reconstruction. Others get long-term hazards and a shrug.

He’s not asking for sympathy. He’s demanding sustained attention - the one resource landmines outlast.