Gijs de Vries quotes:

In situations of military conflict, civil strife, lawlessness, bad governance, and human rights violations, terrorists find it easier to hide, train and prepare their attacks.

The European Borders Agency in Warsaw has been created to help border forces in Europe cooperate more.

If you exchange information internationally, you must strengthen data protection. Those are two sides of the same coin.

I remain optimistic. What we've seen in Europe and the rest of the world is that freedom has a much stronger attraction than radical fundamentalism.

Look at Iraq; look at Afghanistan, where at great personal physical risk people have gone to the polls and have rejected the appeal from Bin Laden and his allies to stay at home.

Police forces collect information to be used in a public court to get people convicted. Security services gather information that does not necessarily lead to people being prosecuted and in many cases needs to remain confidential.

Muslim organisations tend to have a low level of organisation. The communities in Europe are quite diverse.

In intelligence work, there are limits to the amount of information one can share. Confidentiality is essential.

You can't get closer to the heart of national sovereignty than national security and intelligence services.

In the fight against terrorism, national agencies keep full control over their police forces, security and intelligence agencies and judicial authorities.

The majority of the world's Muslims do not believe that terrorism is a legitimate strategy or that Islam is incompatible with democracy.

Ultimately, freedom and democracy are stronger than fear and tyranny.

Europe has a long and tragic history of mostly domestic terrorism.

Terrorists have failed in what is arguably al Qaida's most important objective - to trigger revolutions.

Indiscriminate attacks on civilians ought, under all circumstances, to be illegal in war as in peacetime.

There is a series of sectors which could be severely disrupted by terrorist attacks, particularly if they were to happen in several member states simultaneously.

The idea is to have global standards. There is so much travel that if you just had a regional standard, it would probably ultimately have to be changed.

If you combat an international phenomenon, it is indispensable to share information internationally.

If information ends up in the wrong hands, the lives of people very often are immediately at risk.

It's important that we work very closely with moderate Muslim forces locally, nationally and internationally.

Terrorists always have the advantage of surprise.

The key to tackling Islamist fundamentalism and terrorism from the Islamist community is in the hands of moderate Muslims.

The violent radicals do not legitimately represent the overwhelming majority of the world's Muslims.

There are no automatic links between poverty and terrorism. Among millions of poor people in the world, only a few turn to terrorism.

We are familiar with terrorism. But indiscriminate, cross-border, religiously motivated terrorism is new.

I have never come across a technology that doesn't change. This is inevitable. You have to adapt your systems as technology develops.

We remain vulnerable.There is no such thing as 100 percent security against terrorism.

The central role in the fight against terrorism is with national authorities.

We still lack a global definition of terrorism.