Quotes from Kersti Kaljulaid

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.

Most new jobs created by global digital opportunities make people more independent. Fewer people will work for one company at a time or in the same country all the time. More will work remotely across borders.

People everywhere in the world have Russian connections. There is nothing wrong with having Russian connections as long as you're transparent about it.

The problem is if Russia is organising exercises - and not being transparent about what exactly these exercises are about - it creates suspicions as to their objectives.

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

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

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.

If we look decades ago, we know that NATO allies contributed a lot of equipment close to the border of the Soviet Union.

The E.U. is more resilient than we give it credit for. We always muddle through.

I don't believe Russia would attack a NATO country or NATO as such, no matter which country we are talking about.

We have every reason to put our trust in NATO and in transatlantic cooperation.

In 2008, when Russia attacked Georgia, Western countries took it as an isolated incident, but probably this was the start of the push against our underlying international security architecture. And this push then started a landslide which in 2014 resulted in Crimean occupation.

My mother was a doctor, and I grew up with her in a little apartment belonging to my grandmother, because the Soviet Union never saw fit to let our family have its own apartment.

Governments don't want to be the last ones in the digital sphere if their people and businesses are already there. We have to make clear that the free movement of services in the E.U. also applies in the digital sphere. The shortcut is to create a digital union.

It is interesting that cyberwarfare is developing into something conventional and attacking objects, infrastructure, and critical services.

Sometimes I hear, particularly from Russia, that we simply hate Russia and don't like to co-operate, that we are hysterical about the risks. But this is totally untrue. We would greatly benefit economically if our neighbour was a democratic, developing country.

Not everything is so bad... Whichever way you look at it, we feel that we can face the future when the liberal, democracy-based world sticks together. We have great trust that it will.

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.