Pont Quotes & Sayings

The fundamentals will cause us all to stand and stare; our want for material possessions, our possession and passing on of heirlooms, our want to leave a legacy; our base sexual drives, our wish to be the superior versions of ourselves; our desire to be happy, as an emotion and an idea, that ultimate phantasm. — Simon Pont

We didn't think taxes ought to go up. They ought to go down. We didn't think the census ought to be weakened. — Pete Du Pont

Franklin Roosevelt had to govern at a time of crisis. If you're going to make changes in the way a nation thinks, you have to have the ability to take the crisis of the moment and use it to shape an agenda. — Pete Du Pont

Newt Gingrich's job to capture the Congress was to give Republican candidates an edge and a distinction from their Democratic opponent. That required a very high profile, some very strong language. — Pete Du Pont

If you're going to try to win an election, you can't be 80 percent. You can't say, I'm for what my Democratic opponent is, for but not quite so much of it. — Pete Du Pont

There were some entrepreneurial du Ponts that are a little different from the heads of the corporations today. — Pete Du Pont

Our original idea was to help three or four hundred candidates in the first election run for the Ohio State legislature and the California legislature around the country. — Pete Du Pont

Newt changed the frame of reference of all of our candidates. That's why we won so big in 1994. — Pete Du Pont

Newt correctly assumes that the American public is beginning to look down the road and at least distinguish the landmarks on either side and know where it wants go. We have a chance to lead it there. — Pete Du Pont

They were as unexpected as a mirage, those dancers on the Pont des Arts. Strictly speaking, the bridge is for pedestrians only, but waltzing is allowed on special nights like this. A guitar, a violin, an accordian -- a tune everyone knows -- and the dancers begin to twirl, spin, soar and glide all around us, in love with life at 3/4 time.



Did I say waltzing was allowed?


Under these circumstances, it's mandatory. — Vivian Swift

I have a picture of the Pont Neuf on a wall in my apartment, but i know that Paris is really on the closet shelf, in the box next to the sleeping bag, with the rest of my diaries. — Thomas Mallon

Technology, society, media: these are mutable forms, shape-shifting, forever re-purposing themselves. They sit within the wild, weird and wonderful frame of change. But there is a frame. — Simon Pont

Straight advertising' is the equivalent of ignoring your girlfriend over dinner. Branded content, and CRM, and co-creation is the opposite. It's telling her she's hot. — Simon Pont

Throughout my professional life, I have looked upon the Corps as a most valuable part of our naval organization, and this opinion has only been the more confirmed by every year's additional experience in active service. — Samuel Francis Du Pont

Like a squash ball, locked inside an all-glass court, played in a never ending Sisyphean rally between two invisible and equally able opponents, that's what the Digital State first felt like. A descriptor in search of a winning shot, to break the deadlock, to set it free. — Simon Pont

human handprint made about 30,000 years ago, on the wall of the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in southern France. Somebody tried to say, 'I was here! — Yuval Noah Harari

One of the tragedies of the Bush administration is that we went back to business as usual, make a deal with the Democrats, let's all be friends in Washington philosophy. — Pete Du Pont

Franklin Roosevelt was a great leader. He saw how to use the levers of power to affect change. — Pete Du Pont

Newt has two transitions behind him. First he had to capture control of the House. He had to get the Republican budget through. He had to get the Contract With America through. He has done that. — Pete Du Pont

If we had known that one of those terrorist attacks was coming, could our government have electronically eavesdropped on the attackers without a warrant? — Pete Du Pont

Madame Aubain's servant Felicite was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l'Eveque for half a century. — Gustave Flaubert

There's a very big gulf between the black civil rights leadership in America and the black middle class in America. The black middle class are conservative. Many of those minorities can be persuaded to be members of the Republican Party. — Pete Du Pont

Has President Bush exceeded his constitutional authority or acted illegally in authorizing wiretaps without a warrant? Benjamin Franklin would not have thought so. — Pete Du Pont

For the first time in its history, Western Civilization is in danger of being destroyed internally by a corrupt, criminal ruling cabal which is centered around the Rockefeller interests, which include elements from the Morgan, Brown, Rothschild, Du Pont, Harriman, Kuhn-Loeb, and other groupings as well. This junta took control of the political, financial, and cultural life of America in the first two decades of the twentieth century. — Carroll Quigley

The internet reflects us at our eccentric, absurd, trivial best. It shows us as stoned online game-players and people wearing home-made Tron suits. It reveals that we enjoy watching people blend things like an iPhone, and mix 200 litres of Diet Coke with 500 Mentos mints. Laughing babies and sneezing baby panda's speak to us, despite having nothing to say, and we find all these things hypnotically watchable and briefly hysterical. — Simon Pont

In the street, he turned west and walked against a tide of blank-eyed, gum-chewing faces. A taxi went over a manhole cover, clink-clank. Steam was rising from an excavation at the corner. The world was like a puzzle with half the pieces missing. What was the pont of all these drab buildings, this dirty sky? — Damon Knight

Happiness is our one ultimate end. Boil it right the way down, reduce all those motivational drivers, and sitting right there at the centre of our very human hearts, is our yearning to be happy. — Simon Pont

The struggle you see in the Republican Party today is the country club Republican versus the bowling alley Republican. Colin Powell brings us back to the country club image. He's an insider. He's a moderate. — Pete Du Pont

Talk radio has made an enormous run around establishment media. But the Internet is making an end run around talk radio. Suddenly we're faced with an information age. — Pete Du Pont

Things move very slowly in politics. We seem to fight the same wars over and over again. — Pete Du Pont

The sea change that has come is the information age. We don't have to just read The New York Times anymore. We can pull up something on the Internet and get any news that we like. — Pete Du Pont

They wrong opportunity who say she knocks but once — Pete Du Pont

How much do you enjoy the ad of the hot brunette in the skimpy tank-top winking at you? How much do you enjoy that image of the college hunk with the cubed abdominals blue-steeling into the breeze? Once you make the link that it's American Apparel, or Abercrombie, how do you then feel about that brand? — Simon Pont

Coming out of the Louvre for the first time in 1971, dizzy with new love, I stood on Pont Neuf and made a pledge to myself that the art of this newly discovered world in the Old World would be my life companion. — Susan Vreeland

Friday's "Working Lunch" is at The Avenue on St James's Street. It's a bit like eating in an art installation, a White-Out affair that tries for a So-Serious NYC feel, but is occupied by Daddy's Girls wearing pashmina's and too many Pin Stripes worn by too many people called Hugo. — Simon Pont

You're as strong as the Pont Neuf. You'll live to bury us all! — Marcel Proust

In 1996, I was the head coach at Brigham Young University. And I got a call from my dad, and he said my brother had been murdered by du Pont. And it just infuriated me to just no end. And I think I destroyed everything in my office. — Mark Schultz

Everyone matures. When I was Newt's age, I thought I had the right answer to things. The baby-boomers as political leaders are still on trial by the American people. — Pete Du Pont

Short a bear market, go long in a bull market, either play, you do it on a hunch, harbor a whole lot of hope, then sit back and try not to bite your nails. Because no one knows anything for sure. Foresight is a hunch. Everyone is making it up as best they can, and life's winners are those who smile at the truth of it and can cut a wake through a Sargasso of ego, guesswork, bullshit and chance. — Simon Pont

That's the way it is with entrepreneurial people. You try one thing, it doesn't work, you try another. — Pete Du Pont

The right type of [leader] is democratic. He must not consider himself a superior sort of personage. He must actually feel democratic; it is not enough that he try to pose as democratic-he must be democratic, otherwise the veneer, the sheen, would wear off, for you can't fool a body of intelligent American workingmen for very long. He must ring true. — T. Coleman Du Pont

From the Soviet gulag to the Nazi concentration camps and the killing fields of Cambodia, history teaches that granting the state legal authority to kill innocent individuals has dreadful consequences. — Pete Du Pont

Ronald Reagan gave our party a bowling alley image as opposed to a country club image. We were talking to people who go bowling on Thursday night, and they were understanding what we were saying. — Pete Du Pont

Always preoccupied with his profound researches, the great Newton showed in the ordinary-affairs of life an absence of mind which has become proverbial. It is related that one day, wishing to find the number of seconds necessary for the boiling of an egg, he perceived, after waiting a minute, that he held the egg in his hand, and had placed his seconds watch (an instrument of great value on account of its mathematical precision) to boil!
This absence of mind reminds one of the mathematician Ampere, who one day, as he was going to his course of lectures, noticed a little pebble on the road; he picked it up, and examined with admiration the mottled veins. All at once the lecture which he ought to be attending to returned to his mind; he drew out his watch; perceiving that the hour approached, he hastily doubled his pace, carefully placed the pebble in his pocket, and threw his watch over the parapet of the Pont des Arts. — Camille Flammarion

I'm in a wonderful position: I'm unknown, I'm underrated, and there's nowhere to go but up. — Pete Du Pont

I come from a family that has been here for almost 200 years. My ancestors started a very dangerous gunpowder business in 1802, and my great- grandfather and his father were both killed in gunpowder explosions. — Pete Du Pont

was speaking to hospitality associates at the Four Seasons Hotel in Miami, Florida, when one very young, very skinny, and very brave associate stood up. He said, "I didn't have a father, so I don't know how to properly button my jacket. Do I leave the last button open? When I need help with things like this, I don't know where to look for answers." After that tug at my heart, I wrote this career reference book specifically directed at hospitality associates globally. Hospitality Management: People Skills and Manners On and Off the Job covers just about every area of the hospitality associate's professional and personal life. — Lyn Pont

I got no support from USA Wrestling. I was competing against professional Russians that do nothing but wrestle for a living, and I was forced to take a job working for this lowlife loser, John du Pont, who I didn't want in my life. I just wanted the money. — Mark Schultz

Moderates shouldn't be nervous about Newt because he has a vision, he's laid it forward. He's fundamentally leading us in the way that middle class Americans want to go. — Pete Du Pont