In complicated positions, Bobby Fischer hardly had to be afraid of anybody
My name is Mart Laar. I have been twice Prime Minister of Estonia, and I'm not an economist.
The hardest distance is always from the sofa to the front door
I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours.
Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.
A player can sometimes afford the luxury of an inaccurate move, or even a definite error, in the opening or middlegame without necessarily obtaining a lost position. In the endgame ... an error can be decisive, and we are rarely presented with a second chance.
The human voice is the most perfect instrument of all.
A need to concentrate on each sound, so that every blade of grass would be as important as a flower.
In the endgame, an error can be decisive, and we are rarely presented with a second chance.
Tintinnabulation is like this. Here I am alone with silence. I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence comfort me.
I don't think just being skinny means necessarily anorexic.
An innovation need not be especially ingenious, but it must be well worked out.
One ought to avoid all unnecessary worry and exciting thoughts, and to cultivate a firm tranquility of mind. Melancholy reflections will in no way influence fate, whereas one may weaken the constitution by the waste of energy while indulging in them.
I was unlucky, like my country.
I hope one day when I say I'm from Estonia, people don't say: 'What? Where's that?'
We feel free. We're independent. People can be openly proud of being Estonian. I have a lot of belief in Estonia.
Tintinnabulation is an area I sometimes wander into when I am searching for answers - in my life, my music, my work. In my dark hours, I have the certain feeling that everything outside this one thing has no meaning.
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 Soviet Union wasn't so closed - it wasn't North Korea.
It was a practical system. People were creative and industrious, so if they wanted to see Western TV programs, they would invent a way to do so. It's strange in a way. There was an official truth, and there was daily life.
Melancholy had crept inside me. Small children made me cry, I got depressed eating meat, old book bindings awakened tenderness in me. Everything was disintegrating. Nothing stood the test of time, including me. Somewhere on the other shore were madness and God, sometimes both wearing a beard. Neither instilled much confidence.
Every beginning is difficult, but it gets easier from there on
Chess is a test of wills.
[Kierkegaard] did not care for large public events because every crowd is in itself an untruth. The only way out is isolation, aloofness. Only the individual is a reality and only the individual is true. Maybe the process of isolation in an individual is one of the most important matters that exists. Is not the whole point of this world for people to separate and become individuals?
Even the best grandmasters in the world have had to work hard to acquire the technique of rook endings.
However hopeless the situation appears to be there yet always exists the possibility of putting up a stubborn resistance.
Health can never be divorced from strength.
Man is a creature of light and air, and I should therefore recommend little or no clothing when training.
When you grow up in the Soviet society under the communists you heard about the one man who is especially dangerous, especially crazy, and absolutely mad, and which would destroy all the human beings and the economies and so on, and this man was called Milton Friedman.
The purest natural food for human beings would be fresh, uncooked food and nuts.
A fare which consists of three-quarters of vegetable food and one-quarter meat would appear to be the most satisfactory.
The effort of building an ideal society always leads to violence, often to very extensive violence. Because, whether we like it or not, it is not possible to create an ideal society with imperfect people. And this, unfortunately, we are. So the main purpose for Nazism as well as for Communism was to create a 'new person'. In order to make room for it, the world needed to be rid of its non-perfect models.
Because I have a passion for the play.
My father was a chess teacher, and I learned the play of him as a small child. Occasionally I made another career; but now I have again the possibility of maintaining the passion of my early youth days.
It was life under the Soviet system - we were struggling with every big problem.
Publicly, my parents had to queue up to buy food, but were able to live secret lives in their private rooms. With the TV set in the living room, we were able to see Western pop culture -a different reality from what we were living. For me, it was like two different universes existed at the same time, and we got used to being in these parallel universes.
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.
My childhood in the Soviet Union was not terrible, it was very joyful.
Life under the Soviet system was often funny, absurd really, especially for children.
Working under the Soviet system made you very paranoid - people were afraid of everything - and this paranoia is still in people's minds.
I have a figure, and there aren't many girls out there right now who have that.
Silence is the pause in me when I am near to God.
I don't think Estonians ever really hated Russians.
It was more, 'Leave us alone.' We can't change what is past. We can't blame them for what their parents have done. We never hated them. They didn't destroy us that bad.
I get paid to work; I don't pay to work.
Places like New York are just too intense, too much about money, too much about ambition; it's all too superficial for me.
It's not really like you have a thing like a supermodel anymore.
It's more of a word than a real existence. I think, also, looking at it from a designer's point of view, at one point maybe they felt the stars took too much attention away from the clothes.