Toomas Hendrik Ilves

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

“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 ag...”

“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...”

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

“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 wa...”

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

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

“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,...”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 Russ...”

“In Germany, a country that for obvious reasons is far more attuned than most to the dangers of demagogy, populism, and nationalism, lawmakers have already proposed taking legal measures agai...”

“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.”

“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...”

“In both Russia and the U.S., there are a very small number of very, very rich people, and then there are a lot of people who don't have anything. The less inequality you have in a society, t...”

“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 impover...”

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

“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.”