Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I am not always happy with the compliments Estonia has received.
I think it's quite good to be famous in Estonia - much easier than in the U.S.
In Estonia, our greatest national treasure is our egalitarian educational system.
Skype has a great engineering team, which I like to describe as 'all of Estonia.'
I hope one day when I say I'm from Estonia, people don't say: 'What? Where's that?'
In Estonia, the Russian minority can move freely, travel freely, work anywhere in Europe.
When I left Estonia, I was 16. I just wanted to leave; I wanted to see the world so much.
Denmark and Estonia both refused to prosecute the Danske Bank case when we filed in 2013.
Estonia is proud of the fact that the country today has a flourishing and happy Jewish life.
My name is Mart Laar. I have been twice Prime Minister of Estonia, and I'm not an economist.
Creating a new country from scratch has given Estonia the license to imagine what a country could be.
We feel free. We're independent. People can be openly proud of being Estonian. I have a lot of belief in Estonia.
For Estonia, joining Europe meant our potential as a country increased - not decreased - because of that connectedness.
You could go to Estonia and there's probably an episode of 'Seinfeld' playing there. Television is a very powerful thing.
That was something that shaped my thinking regarding Estonia: the idea that we should be getting our young people to work with computers.
If Estonia or any member-state was invaded and Article V was not invoked, NATO will fall apart. If it fails once, the alliance will no longer exist.
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.
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.
I am looking forward to a series of productive meetings in both Austria and Estonia, particularly what role organized crime plays in the Baltic drug trade.
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.
I was in Estonia when a professor asked me if I was aware that making any criticism of the Red Army during the war was now an imprisonable offence. I was quite shaken.
In Northern Estonia, the Soviet authorities didn't have a recipe on how to fight against the popularity of Finnish TV. Audiences didn't want to watch hardcore Soviet propaganda.
You know what I always dreamed of? That with the greenhouse effect, one day Estonia can be what L.A. is right now. I always thought when the end of the world comes, I want to be in Estonia. I think then I'd survive.
The E.U. is very popular in Estonia, and for very good reasons - not because Estonia has received considerable support from the E.U., but because Europe supports the values which keep small states safe in this world.
I feel like, Estonia, the sky is so low, and the people are much more close-minded than in America. So when I came to the U.S., I had a massive explosion of creativity and felt like I could do basically anything I want.
Estonia maintains a two-language school system. I don't know many countries in the world that provide a system like ours. We are making sure that our Russian-speaking minority feels comfortable and involved in this country.
No well-run yacht basin in Southern waters is complete without at least two sun-burned, salt bleached-headed Esthonians who are waiting for a check from their last article. When it comes they will set sail to another yacht basin and write another saga.
I grew up in a small town in the woods of Estonia, and there was not much else around me besides nature. It was stunning, but I dreamt of meeting eccentric people and going exciting places. Music became my escape. I thought if I got good enough, I could leave.
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.
A Global Magnitsky Bill, which broadens the scope of the US Magnitsky Act to human rights abusers around the world was passed in December 2016. Estonia adopted Magnitsky legislation in December 2016, and the UK followed in April 2017. These are great successes, but my fight for justice continues.
As the president of Estonia, I represent the only truly digital society which actually has a state; almost all our citizens' interactions with the government, including voting, can be done securely online, and our 'e-residents' can incorporate and run their businesses in Estonia without ever having to set foot here.
The fact that Skype was founded in Estonia, the fact that Skype had a successful exit, which meant that Estonia benefited in a major way, meant that entrepreneurship became legitimate. There were more than a thousand people who either worked or had worked at Skype who had seen what it takes to build a global business.
I was in my early 20s when Estonia joined the E.U. For a kid who'd grown up in the Soviet Union, it seemed like my country had come of age. For a country that had been isolated and cut off from the rest of the world, it seemed like we were becoming part of the global community. It opened a whole new world of possibility.
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.
In 1994, Estonia became the first European country to adopt a flat tax, and its 26 percent flat tax dramatically energized what had been a faltering economy. Before adopting the flat tax, the Estonian economy was literally shrinking. In the eight years after 1994, Estonia experienced real economic growth - averaging 5.2 percent per year.
