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"And, finally, the adoption of a cultural policy which can emphasize the specificity of Macau as a cultural meeting-point and as a city where the common living of two civilizations has been effected for centuries in an atmosphere of perfect harmony and mutual respect".

From the speech delivered by Mário Soares, the President of the Republic, at the investiture of the Governor of Macau - Lisbon, at the Palácio de Belém, 15th May 1986

"And because culture is the whole product of Man's creative activity, a humanist policy - a policy for men, so that men be men - is, necessarily, a cultural policy in terms of both its effects and the conception which founds it. The future of any community is in the hands of those who constitute it. It is necessary that they have the capacity, the courage, the determination and the faith to act accordingly. If that be the case, the future will no longer be "something which falls upon man (...), that which is suffered (...), but instead (...) something which is taken into our hands while and as that which should be built in creative freedom", as was masterly put by Karl Rahner. That is what I call a CULTURAL PROJECT, of a CULTURE written in capital letters, fed and crossed by the flesh and the blood of both the men who are there and those who have gone, of a culture for the generation, the education and the fulfillment of the men yet to come, and not an academic culture of the learned for themselves".

"Macau is in itself a multicoloured net woven with threads of different cultures, intersected in a thousand ways. On the other way, on account of its geographical position, Macau is an interface including various peoples, races and civilizations. Macau is, therefore, a territory with enormous potentialities in what concerns every project which pressuposes, or even has in mind, a vast cultural pluralism. Among those projects, the greatest is that of world peace. Well, peace among the peoples has its laboratory in the acquaintanceship of cultures - for culture, as a product of creation, is human work by excellence - an acquaintanceship which leads, through the discovery of the common ontological values and the complementarity of differences to the objective recognition of a universal human family, without any boundaries. That being so, Macau can - and, therefore, must- become an exemplary and enzymotic space for peace, the greatest dream of humanity, which is materialized in the total development of all men, in the total solidarity of all, as Pope Paul 6th, the herald of the "civilization of love", proclaimed.

The whole project - a project for Macau and from Macau to the world - is, I insist, a CULTURAL project.

Words spoken by the Governor of Macau, Professor Pinto Machado at his investiture - Palácio de. Belém, 15th May 1986.