Boutros Boutros-Ghali Quotes

So this is why I'm always say happy that somebody mentions Rwanda, because behind Rwanda, we have Africa.

But I believe that the DPKO at this time was very much involved with American administration and was acting, taking on consideration the demand or the recommendation of the American administration. American administration was very powerful.

The problem is when you are writing something in retrospective, it needs a lot of courage not to change, or you will forget a certain reality, and you will just take in consideration your view today.

I used to say I never talk about my successor, neither about my predecessor.

Only stupid people don't change their minds.

Water will be more important than oil this century

The lesson I learned in Cairo still applies. The only way to deal with bureaucrats is with stealth and sudden violence.

For President Clinton, according to this discussion I had with him, Rwanda was a marginal problem.

Democracy is an objective. Democratization is a process. Democratization serves the cause of peace because it offers the possibility of justice and of progressive change without force.

We must rid the world of the scourge of these agents of death and destruction

We were not realizing that, with just a machete, you can do a genocide.

I believe it will take time to find a solution to the problem. Thus we must have patience.

I will continue to work for the advancement of freedoms in Egypt and the Arab world until I drop dead ... Education itself - which can and should play an important role in the apprenticeship of tolerance and respect for other people - sometimes encourages identitarian closure, or even extremist behaviour ... It is therefore vital to ensure that education does not encourage rejection of other people or identitarian closure, but that on the contrary it encourages knowledge and respect for other cultures, other religions and other ways of being and living.

It has long been recognized that an essential element in protecting human rights was a widespread knowledge among the population of what their rights are and how they can be defended.

The failure of the United Nations - My failure is maybe, in retrospective, that I was not enough aggressive with the members of the Security Council.

The real problem was not the troops; the real problem was that only the United States had the infrastructure to do the transport of troops with big planes, and then who will pay?

But definitely, when a decision is taken, or when you are trying to oppose a decision, you are in a weaker position than the member states, because they know more about the situation than you. We gave information, but they never gave us any information.

There is a greater fatigue concerning the African problem today than five or 10 years ago. The situation now in Africa is worse today than it was 10 years ago.

In Yugoslavia, I'd asked for additional forces too. I even went to meet the French prime minister, and I proposed additional forces ... Nobody wanted to send troops.

While the broad principles of democracy are universal, the fact remains that their application varies considerably ... We are at the beginning of the road, at the very beginning. We still have a long way to go.

It would be some time before I fully realized that the United States sees little need for diplomacy. Power is enough. Only the weak rely on diplomacy The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States.

For us, genocide was the gas chamber - what happened in Germany. We were not able to realize that with the machete you can create a genocide.