Top 284 Quotes & Sayings by Estonian Authors - Page 3

Changing behaviour is a very slow process.

Talent is the lifeblood of a fast-growing company.

Can the wider West establish a global 'cyber NATO?' It would be difficult, but so, too, was the founding of NATO itself, which was called into being only after successive communist coups in Eastern Europe.

I left home when I was 16 years old, and I've been living all around the world honing my craft. I lived in L.A. for eight years, then Stockholm, London, and New York.

In the past, when I shot films about fishermen and hunters, I always had to admire their ability to perceive time in its entirety. The present was always temporary.

I wrote 'Love Is Dead' when I was a super-depressed teenager.

Finding out about Bjork was like finding out about some rare and magical thing that I had never encountered living where I was living at the time, being surrounded by the people I was surrounded by.

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.

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.

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

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, the more social peace you have. It's kind of a no-brainer.

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.

We built TransferWise focused on customer innovation. That means we build our product based first and foremost on our customers.

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 against fake news. When populist, nationalist fake news threatens the liberal democratic center, other Europeans may follow suit.

I don't want to sound like I'm a special type of Russia hater. There are very few heads of state in Europe that would not like to have very good relations with Russia.

Our people are willing to work with the government on new technologies. Now, it's a habit; every Estonian looks at it as part of our national identity. We understand that this allows us to provide better services to our people than our money would allow.

Climate change, migration... they transcend national borders and require an international response.

I think that if Britain does decide to leave the E.U., that would be a disaster for the technology sector here and probably also for the broader economy.

That radio was very important for me. It meant I always knew what was going on in the world.

Once you acknowledge that human brains are basically made of atoms and acknowledge that atoms are governed by simple laws of physics, then there is no reasoning principle why computers couldn't do anything that people are doing, and we don't really see any evidence that this is not the case.

Estonia is proud of the fact that the country today has a flourishing and happy Jewish life.

Too many people in the world associate democracy with their ability to go and buy more and more every year. I come from a country where it's much more popular to remind people that democracy is available at every income level, and this is something which you need to protect.

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.

I try to make sure I get decent sleep cause I'm not a very fun person to be around at all if I haven't slept.

I shop everywhere. I love to shop online.Ebay is like heaven for me.

I don't want to just make music. My only problem is that there are 24 hours in a day and that I have one of me.

Globally, we need to make sure that markets are open... If we see that there are restrictions on free trade, then simple economic logic will demonstrate that this is not beneficial.

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.

I did an MBA because when I left Skype, I didn't have a clear idea of whether I wanted to create or join a company. But you don't need an MBA to become an entrepreneur.

Places like New York are just too intense, too much about money, too much about ambition; it's all too superficial for me.

The E.U. is a common platform where we come together and agree to do certain things. But the E.U. is never going to take over the responsibility which governments have for prosperity and security of their people.

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.

I was born behind the Iron Curtain, and I remember heated discussions about large-scale terra-forming projects, such as reversing the direction of the river Ob or putting up large reflectors into space to heat up Siberia.

It really sucks to be the number two intelligent species on this planet; you can just ask gorillas.

I come from a very dysfunctional family, so I was comfortable in misery. So I would create more misery for myself because I didn't know anything else.

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.

Small nations have no time for small goals - they have to think big in order to become contributors.

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 attitude to failure is one of the characteristics that's often called out as the difference between the U.S. and Europe. And we do need to be less risk-averse, more embracing of failure. Having failed makes you look bad in Europe. But in the U.S., it makes you look experienced.

My favorite form of meditation is breathwork - if you're crazy like me and find it hard to sit still, you should try it.

I love graveyards. To some, it might sound morbid, but there's nothing dark about the natural cycles of life, really.

It's a conscious decision, a full-time job, to be happy.

From kindergarten, I knew that politics is something that you talk about only at home, because if you weren't quiet, your parents might be taken to prison. All Estonian families have these kind of stories.

I am very worried about politicians who know that their countries are greatly benefiting financially and at the same time are saying that the European Union is not good for us. The message has to be coherent.

On 'Utopia,' I mix sick beats with ethereal elements while trying to keep the focus very much on the songwriting. If you strip any of these songs down to just the vocal and a piano, there's a real song in there.

It's just so nice when your pet isn't all needy. I need a lot of space, so dogs suffocate me.

The technology is not an end in itself: it is a tool. It can make it easier for us to communicate or manage our finances. It can help us take care of our health or help policemen in their work. It can create jobs and boost growth. It can enhance transparency and accessibility to services.

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

In my view, the fact that computers caught up to humans and completely dominate humans in chess and some other domains already, that says there's evidence that, yes, in principle, they can be better programmers than humans.

If the hard Brexit happens, I would assume that London wouldn't be the centre of the tech world in Europe.

If we think about how long Google spent searching - I think they came around in '98? And, OK, Gmail came in 2004, but it was literally built by one engineer as a 20%-time project. It was probably 10 years before Google started diversifying.

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.'

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.

I used to have the very standard worldview. I can easily identify with people who see computers getting faster and smarter, and technology getting more and more beneficial, without seeing the other side.

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.

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.

The U.S., together with trans-Atlantic allies, never recognized the occupation of the Baltic states by the Soviet Union. Moscow faced pressure or retaliation every time it tried to move toward official recognition, or at least acceptance, of its claim that the Baltic states were Soviet republics.

With that radio I was always swimming with the current political streams in the West. I was never stranded.

The financial crisis of 2008 created a seismic shift in the dynamics of trust in financial services. FinTech would have happened without the global financial crisis - but it would have taken much longer.

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