Top 48 Estonia Quotes & Sayings

Here I was in Estonia, doing a concert for 5,000 people, and not many people know the song My Way - Gorbachev in the 80s, My Way had just become a famous song, and [Mikhail] Gorbachev in a satirical, kind of cynical manner coined the term the Sinatra Doctrine and My Way was the song because the Baltic states in the Warsaw Pact wanted to go their own way and secede from the Soviet Union, so joking he says," Yeah, we've got the Sinatra Doctrine now."

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.

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.

President Bush Sr. and Secretary Baker, way back when, told Gorbachev, "We are not going to advance NATO into Eastern Europe. We're not going to - we're not going to advance NATO into East Germany, if you allow the unification of Germany." Where is that pledge? Where is the logic behind a military alliance, devised in the time of communism, before the Berlin Wall fell, now being in the Ukraine, in Poland, in Estonia, in Latvia and Lithuania? I don't understand.

So many times after a catastrophe like 9/11, Estonia in Sweden, the Holocaust or whatever, we are so fond of lifting up the hero examples, but actually 99 percent of survivors have done something that they feel very guilty about.

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.

Skype has a great engineering team, which I like to describe as 'all of Estonia.'

The fact that refugees traveled through six other countries, like former Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, France, Germany, Holland, is because they like our social benefits. They like our welfare state. They know which country to pick. They're not going to stay in Hungary or in Estonia. They come to Germany, to Holland. And people sense that those are not the real refugees. And our government has spent billions of euros on them, and the Dutch people know.

I sing My Way, I say this to the whole country, "Well, the President of Estonia sent me a message." He heard about it because of what's happening in Russia right now and the power grab that [Vladimir] Putin has.

For Estonia, joining Europe meant our potential as a country increased - not decreased - because of that connectedness.

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

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.

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.

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 think we have started accelerating over the past years. It's a modernization of NATO. It's at air, it's at sea, it's undersea, it's in cyber. Estonia in 2007, hit by Russian cyber-attacks. So what you see there with those exercises are critical.

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.

We feel free. We're independent. People can be openly proud of being Estonian. I have a lot of belief in Estonia.

When I left Estonia, I was 16. I just wanted to leave; I wanted to see the world so much.

I am not always happy with the compliments Estonia has received.

I hope one day when I say I'm from Estonia, people don't say: 'What? Where's that?'

For two years now, my office has had the honour and the privilege of sponsoring seminars on the functioning of government in this country for Eastern Europeans. These seminars and exchanges have brought together representatives from such nations as Bulgaria, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Republic, Roumania, Poland, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Ukraine, all of them anxious to learn what makes a society as diverse as Canada work and how our institutions make it governable.

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.

In the mid-1980s, however, the Estonian TV programmers came up with a clever idea: they asked Moscow for millions of rubles to make propaganda in Estonia to fight the Finnish programs' popularity. They got millions from the government, but what they made was not propaganda at all! They simply made good, entertaining programs - no one in Estonia recognized them as propaganda, only Russia thought it was, so they got away with it. Of course, Russia provided their own propaganda programs, but Estonians knew to avoid them.

Putin is a despot, and he's a very good despot. And he will see things in a narrow way. What is good for Russia? That is what he will do. If that's represented by a move toward the Baltic, that would be very dangerous, but he would do it, on the assumption that he would ask himself the question: I am prepared to fight for Estonia. Is the United States? Is Germany? Is Britain, France?

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.

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

Denmark and Estonia both refused to prosecute the Danske Bank case when we filed in 2013.

I had this crazy, a bit of a near-death experience in Estonia. I had these visions of the future but I was in this state where I felt the past, the present, and the future were all happening at the same time.

I can't believe that the Russians really think they're more insecure because Estonia is in NATO. And we don't have forces poised in Estonia to attack Russia.

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.

You know that Estonia, based largely on how successful Skype was, built by Estonian developers, that was a tenth of the entire country's GDP when eBay bought it. That was like a decade ago, it was f****** Estonia, they were behind the Iron Curtain two decades earlier. They're now pushing for K-12 education in computer science in public schools. They've gotten the message. They know how much value that can bring.

In Estonia, the Russian minority can move freely, travel freely, work anywhere in Europe.

You could go to Estonia and there's probably an episode of 'Seinfeld' playing there. Television is a very powerful thing.

How many people in the United States do you think will be willing to go to war to free Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania?

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.

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.

Creating a new country from scratch has given Estonia the license to imagine what a country could be.

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 Estonia, our greatest national treasure is our egalitarian educational system.

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.

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.

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.

We have to show every team, whether it's Estonia, Belarus or Belgium, the same respect.

If you had said to anyone in 1945, at the end of the Second World War with the continent it ruins, that you could have a European Union of 28 member states stretching from Portugal in the West to Estonia in the East, all of them more-or-less liberal democracies - they wouldn't have believed you.

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.

My name is Mart Laar. I have been twice Prime Minister of Estonia, and I'm not an economist.