War & Peace Quote by Zuzana Caputova

Caputova’s line is a politician’s answer to a citizen’s craving: safety that doesn’t feel like a permanent state of emergency. The first clause offers the broad, disarming consensus leaders reach for when societies are tired and divided. Everyone wants peace; everyone wants security. Then she pivots, narrowing the battleground from borders and budgets to the inner life, where fear becomes either a solvent or a weapon.

The intent is quietly corrective. In an era when “security” is routinely sold as more surveillance, harder policing, sharper enemies, she reframes it as a psychological and moral starting point. That doesn’t deny material threats; it refuses to let anxiety be the governing ideology. The subtext is a warning about what happens when politics outsources people’s sense of stability to the state alone: you get a public that can be managed through panic, and a democracy that starts to confuse protection with control.

As a sitting president, Caputova also signals a particular kind of leadership: restorative rather than martial. Coming from Slovakia’s post-Communist, geopolitically exposed reality - shaped by Russian aggression nearby, information warfare, and the stress-test of liberal institutions - the line reads less like self-help and more like civic hygiene. If peace begins in “minds and hearts”, then propaganda, cynicism, and scapegoating are not side issues; they are security threats. She’s asking for a culture sturdy enough to resist the easy narcotics of grievance, and for citizens to treat inner steadiness as a public resource, not a private luxury.