Welcome to the Official page of the Presidency of the Portuguese Republic

It is with great pleasure that I am here today. There are several reasons for this. To see the new and the good things that are happening in my country is always a good reason for joy, principally when there is an idea that we have a tendency towards lamentation. I trust we are getting over this illness...

Four young Portuguese scientists are receiving a prize that will open up opportunities for them to be able to continue their research work. Filipa, Leonor, Patrícia and Rosalina are part of a new Portugal that I keep on discovering in my travels around a country that wants to change, to grow, to face without delay everything stimulating that is happening around the world.

I know that not everything that happens is good. We all know that. But focusing on the bad sometimes prevents us from seeing the good, far less the optimal. We must agree that this is not an attitude that will cause peoples to grow. And how we need to grow! Youths like these four scientists here today make us grow. Attitudes such as those of the company here today make us grow.

How good it is to see that so many, and increasingly more, institutions linked to various activities – in this case cosmetics and dermatology – are concerned about improving the wellbeing of those who have very little and need a lot more. Involvement with the needy, involvement in research – in this case scientific – is an attitude that we all approve. It is the death of egoism, it is the certainty that there are now a lot of us and there will increasingly be more of us concerned about others who do not have the same wellbeing that we enjoy and that some of us are event tempted to view as a right. Beware! It’s not, it never is. It requires fighting and working, it demands solidarity.

Solidarity – this is the key word that many of the institutions that we considered were interested only in business pure and simple are now using to teach us to see in another way. Social solidarity. We can all be solidary. Give a little of our time, our energy to causes that warrant our action. Here, today, we have a great international name in the world of cosmetics that is becoming involved and involves thousands of people in causes linked mainly with women and children. But let it not be said that men do not use cosmetics, for I know this is no longer true...

Much has been done, but much is still to be done. Professor Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and inventor of micro-credit, discovered this egg of Columbus that has done so much for his impoverished country, Bangladesh, and for the whole world. Because he had a simple, feasible dream: simply to put an end to poverty in the world.

In our own way, too, we are here, today, co-operating in this project, for we all know there are many forms of poverty.