Toomas Hendrik Ilves

“Where a country lies is a subjective decision and only in part a product of its own desire. Much, if not most, is determined by what others believe about it.”

“Sanctions work over time. They do work, but it takes years for them to have an effect.”

“The fake news is - I mean, as a tool of warfare - has been there for decades and decades and decades. It was never very well done until, really, the Ukraine, though I would say that the Russians used to complain about fake things to say the State Department.”

“Brits, Scandinavians, Finns, Estonians consider themselves rational, logical, unencumbered by emotional arguments; we are businesslike, stubborn, and hard-working.”

“When your country is in dire straits, it doesn't matter whether you're a social democrat or not.”

“Digital warfare, in the Clausewitz definition as 'the continuation of policy by other means,' reached Western public consciousness via my own country, Estonia, in 2007 when our governmental, banking, and news media servers were hit with 'distributed denial-of-service attacks,' which is when hackers overload servers until they shut down.”

“Because of cyberattacks and fake news, we can already imagine the problem all democratic societies will face in future elections: how to limit lies when they threaten democracy?”

“The rights that people have offline must also be protected online.”

“That was something that shaped my thinking regarding Estonia: the idea that we should be getting our young people to work with computers.”

“I was the child of refugees.”

“Liberal democracies do not and often cannot respond in kind to cyberattacks on their own way of governance.”

“When Estonia reestablished its sovereignty after a half century of successive thuggish, totalitarian, foreign occupations by the Soviets, the Nazis, and then again the Soviets, we knew we wanted to create a democratic country characterized by rule of law and respect for human rights.”

“People have actually figured out that Estonia is one of the few post-Communist countries that has a genuine image in people's minds as being something.”

“I remember starting to read about the Soviet Union when I was eight years old; I think I was reading my father's 'New York Times.'”

“Generally, people's fear and hesitancy regarding greater computerization comes from a George Orwell/'1984'-based metaphor of a single computer or data base where all your information is stored, knows everything about you, and can use this information at will and for evil purposes.”

“There is no Baltic identity with a common culture, language group, religious tradition.”

“It is hard to work with the nagging doubt that perhaps some foreign intelligence agency is reading all your correspondence, especially when you know they have done so in the past.”

“Russia has had very aggressive military exercises. They've practiced mock nuclear attacks on Warsaw. Russian bombers practiced attacking strategic military targets in Sweden. The military aggression gets everybody nervous.”

“I knew who Bruce Springsteen was before he had his first record.”

“In a modern digitalized world, it is possible to paralyze a country without attacking its defense forces: The country can be ruined by simply bringing its SCADA systems to a halt. To impoverish a country, one can erase its banking records. The most sophisticated military technology can be rendered irrelevant. In cyberspace, no country is an island.”