Hope is the strongest driving force for a people. Hope which brings about change, which produces new realities, is what opens man's road to freedom. Once hope has taken hold, courage must unite with wisdom. That is the only way of avoiding violence, the only way of maintaining the calm one needs to respond peacefully to offenses.

I have to believe in the possibility of peace, because the alternative is to accept the inevitability of continual war, and of always living in fear. It doesn't have to be that way. However, there are no simple solutions, and I am not the possessor of a magic formula for peace. All I can say is that for peace to succeed it requires perseverance, patience, humility, compromise, and commitment, from all parties.

Peace consists, very largely, in the fact of desiring it with all one's soul. The inhabitants of my small country, Costa Rica, have realized those words by Erasmus. Mine is an unarmed people, whose children have never seen a fighter or a tank or a warship.

Peace is not a dream; it is hard work, and there is nothing naive, glamorous or simplistic about it.

My country is a country of teachers. It is therefore a country of peace. We discuss our successes and failures in complete freedom. Because our country is a country of teachers, we closed the army camps, and our children go about with books under their arms, not with rifles on their shoulders. We believe in dialogue, in agreement, in reaching a consensus.

We are calling on countries that supply weapons to comply with certain restrictions: not to sell weapons to human rights abusers, not to sell them to governments or groups carrying out aggression against states, not to make weapons sales that could disrupt security or development in the receiving region. These are in many ways common sense principles, but sadly, there seems to be very little common sense in the international arms trade.

Hope is the strongest driving force for a people. Hope which brings about change, which produces new realities, is what opens man's road to freedom. Once hope has taken hold, courage must unite with wisdom. That is the only way of avoiding violence, the only way of maintaining the calm one needs to respond peacefully to offenses.