All the time, with mastery, density and competence, Professor Ricardo invites the reader to this journey, marked by advances and setbacks, in the process of historical construction of people's rights. The work reflects his restless, critical, avid, devastating spirit, with the merit of deep holistic and interdisciplinary knowledge, which makes law, literature, history, philosophy and poetry dialogue, in the historical impulse destined to the affirmation of rights, dignity and justice. On each page the infinite value of the human being and of the stubborn struggle for life overflowing with full meaning is celebrated. In the same sense, I believe, the defense of human rights inspires us to the daily exercise of "salvation of our own souls", translating the creative and transforming action of realities, which has in the other a being worthy of equal consideration and of the most deep respect, endowed with the right to exercise human potentialities with autonomy and freedom. And, as Professor Ricardo recalls, when quoting Mishna (Treaty Sanhedrin 4: 5): "Whoever saves a soul, it is as if he saved the whole world." From the foreword by Dr. Flávia Piovesan