Toomas Hendrik Ilves

I'm an American by accent, and I grew up in the States, living there between the age of three and 24.

The Russian Federation's practice of instant citizenship, whereby Russian passports are distributed willy-nilly to ethnic Russians abroad so they can be 'protected' in their current homeland, is unacceptable. Passports are travel documents, not a tool to justify aggression.

Nothing costs more than the loss of freedom.

Diplomacy between a powerful, victorious army and a side that's losing doesn't really work well.

The minute a collective alliance fails to live up to its agreement to collective defence, then from that moment on, everybody is on the run.

Cybersecurity needs to be taken seriously by everyone.

The whole information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure must be regarded as an 'ecosystem' in which everything is interconnected. It functions as a whole; it must be defended as a whole.

In cyberwarfare, it is much harder to identify the attacker and, therefore, to know how to retaliate.

The domestic policy of any president, U.S. or otherwise, is his or her own concern, as long as democratic norms are followed.

Everything can be known and, in some cases, everything is known.

Big data knows and can deduce more about you than Big Brother ever could.

Since I've been writing about things my entire life, I thought, 'Well, that's what I would do as a president is to read and then write and talk about things that are interesting to me.'

There was a period in my life when I was very young that I wrote a sonnet a day just to learn concision in writing.

The Soviet Union collapsed without a lot of people thinking it should or would, whereas for Estonia, it was something we'd been praying for for 60 years.

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.

In Russia, tweeting or sharing real news that's embarrassing to the regime can land you in prison. Imagine, then, the response of the regime to 'fake news' that's damaging to the Kremlin.

My American undergraduate education probably gave me a better idea of the fundamentals of what European civilization is about, better than the undergraduate education you get at most European universities.

I was surprised by some of my French colleagues who immediately assumed that because I spoke English with an American accent, that, therefore, you must be a supporter of whoever is the current president of the United States. There seems to be this widespread feeling that, 'Oh, American accent - therefore, you like cowboy boots.'

George Bush and I share a love of steel brush cutters. It turns out we use the same professional brush cutter. He asked me what I did. I said I cut brush. He says, 'Oh, what do you use?' I said steel. He goes, 'Oh, me too.'

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.

It's much cheaper to influence elections than it is to go to war.

I'm not afraid of code. I mean, I understand how these things work. I thought that that was the one area where Estonia was playing on a level playing field.

Little by little, we're becoming a boring Nordic country.

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.

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

We Estonians will do what is necessary to join the European Union.

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.

The E-government cabinet, E-health services, online voting, online pre-filled tax returns, e-mobile parking, are all examples of Estonian innovation, but far more importantly, they are examples of the transformative power of intensive and extensive use of Information Technology in the public sector.

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.

The thing people forget is that the entire world - or, at least, Europe, U.S., transatlantic, Russia, Soviet Union - that security architecture has been in place since 1945 and has been refined. Already, the U.N. charter that everyone signed is that you can't change borders through use of force or even threat of use of force.

Fake news is cheap to produce. Genuine journalism is expensive.

When hackers have access to powerful computers that use brute force hacking, they can crack almost any password; even one user with insecure access being successfully hacked can result in a major breach.

People who come out of the liberal arts don't have an understanding of science and technology, and the people in science and technology have very little experience with liberal arts and the traditions of a liberal democracy.

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

If getting young people computer-literate through putting school systems online is a no-brainer, at least in retrospect, getting older people and those in rural areas online can be a tougher nut to crack.

The first time cyber was even a panel discussion at the Munich Security Conference, which is - I mean, we've got hundreds of specialists there - was 2011. That's how long it took.

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

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.

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

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.

I've been in and out of academia ever since I was young.

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.'

I was the child of refugees.

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.

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

When our diplomats go abroad, they are surprised that they can't do the things that they can do here.

The problem of online identity is expressed best in an old 'New Yorker' cartoon with a picture of a dog next to a computer, and the dog says, 'No one online knows you're a dog.'

I realised that if we were not in the E.U., there were people in the E.U. who were also members of NATO that would veto our joining NATO.