Daily Inspiration Quote by Lennart Meri

Security, Meri suggests, is not a mood you can dial up with a press release or a few new locks; it is a condition that either holds or collapses. The bluntness is the point. By comparing security to virginity, he strips away the comforting bureaucratic language that treats safety as incremental, “improving,” or “mostly under control.” In Meri's frame, one successful violation doesn’t merely dent security - it cancels the claim that it existed.

The subtext is political, aimed at audiences tempted by half-measures and symbolic assurances. This is a statesman’s way of saying: stop selling risk management as protection. It’s also a warning about the asymmetry of threats. A state can spend years building institutions, alliances, and deterrence, and an adversary needs only one breach - a coup, an invasion, a compromised border, a captured information channel - to prove the system’s promises were conditional. The metaphor is intentionally uncomfortable because complacency is comfortable.

Context matters. Meri led Estonia through the post-Soviet 1990s, when “security” wasn’t an abstract policy category but a question of whether your country would remain a country. For small states bordering larger powers, security isn’t a gradient; it’s a binary enforced by reality. The line doubles as a case for hard guarantees - NATO, credible defense, resilient institutions - and an indictment of the soothing fiction that neutrality, goodwill, or technical fixes can substitute for them.