Peace, like charity, begins at home.
Interpretation
True peace starts within our own lives and relationships before it can be extended to the world.
The quote emphasizes that the foundation of peace is cultivated in our personal lives and surroundings. Just as charity, or caring for others, must originate from a place of love and stability at home, peace must also be nurtured within our own hearts and communities. Only when we find and practice peace in our immediate environments can we hope to extend that peace outward to the broader world.
In practice
During a community meeting about conflict resolution, one might say this quote to emphasize the importance of resolving personal disputes first.
There has been one persistent theme through all Axis propaganda. This theme has been that Americans are admittedly rich, that Americans have considerable industrial power - but that Americans are soft and decadent, that they cannot and will not unite and work and fight. ... Let them tell that to the Marines!
The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.
A war of ideas can no more be won without books than a naval war can be won without ships. Books, like ships, have the toughest armor, the longest cruising range, and mount the most powerful guns.
Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too.
Before peace between the nations, we have to find peace inside that small nation which is our own being.
The basis of world peace is the teaching which runs through almost all the great religions of the world. Love thy neighbor as thyself.
Peace is not something you wish for, it's something you make
The methods of peace propaganda which aim at establishing peace doctrine by argument and by creating a feeling favorable to peace in general seem to fall short of reaching the springs of human action and of dealing with the causes of the conduct which they seek to modify.
Our capacity to make peace with another person and with the world depends very much on our capacity to make peace with ourselves.
No one has done more to prevent conflict - no one has made a greater sacrifice for the cause for Peace - than you, America's proud missile submarine family. You stand tall among our heroes of the Cold War.
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