Success Quote by Boutros Boutros-Ghali

Diplomacy is often sold as lofty principle; in practice it runs on omission. Boutros Boutros-Ghali's line is a polished piece of institutional self-defense: an ex-UN secretary-general insisting that he "never" speaks about his successor or predecessor. The phrasing performs neutrality while quietly advertising how rare neutrality is in the job. By making the rule sound personal and habitual ("I used to say"), he frames restraint as character, not calculation.

The intent is obvious to anyone who has watched international bodies chew through leaders: don't give states, journalists, or rivals an easy quote to weaponize. The UN secretary-general lives inside a permanent blame machine. Praise a successor and you look like you're lobbying; criticize one and you become a faction. Speak about a predecessor and you invite comparisons that turn every decision into a referendum on someone else's era. So he chooses the only defensible posture: administrative amnesia.

The subtext is sharper. Saying he refuses to discuss either direction of the timeline hints that the timeline itself is a trap. At the UN, personalities are supposed to be secondary to mandates, yet every secretary-general is relentlessly personalized by the Security Council, by Washington and other capitals, by the press. Boutros-Ghali knew this intimately: his first term collided with post-Cold War power politics, Somalia and Rwanda, and a U.S. campaign to block his reappointment. The quote reads like someone who learned, the hard way, that in global governance, words about people quickly become policy by proxy.