Words matter. These are the best Alexandra Petri Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Good laughs melt out of memory pretty quickly.
It’s easier to find the joke in something when you think, ‘This – this is ridiculous.’
President Obama deserves our unalloyed praise for hastening Osama bin Laden’s demise.
It turns out that in order to think well, knowledge helps.
Life has its trade-offs. As you age, you lose things like teeth and the ability to play in the ball pit at fast-food restaurants, and you gain things like experience and employer-based health insurance.
I can be serious for an hour; then I have to go lie down.
Woodstock didn’t define a generation because everyone showed up or those who did were a perfectly representative sample. It defined a generation because, for a few days, it bottled its peculiar zeitgeist.
Pleasure reading has long been an American ideal – generations of schoolchildren have headed home for the summer toting recreational reading lists. But try to pitch it to a group of non-readers, and they quickly become suspicious.
One of the things I try to do – and I always regret when I’m not doing it – is I try to read as much as possible as I’m consuming news.
If you want to be famous because you do something well or badly, be it singing while fat or hitting balls of various shapes and hues, you have to be prepared to divulge. We live in the age of the chronic overshare.
It’s not that Millennials don’t believe some things are serious. We’ll make ‘It Gets Better’ videos or perform comedy for disaster relief. But sum up our lives in a phrase? The Importance of Never Being Too Earnest.
Bills ought to be passed with deliberation by committees. Change should be achieved in a bipartisan manner. Incrementally, day by day, we should reach a consensus – not perfect, by any means – but something that we can be proud of, nonetheless.
Hi, my name is Alexandra, and I’m a netaholic.
Ferguson shows the power of social media. This could have not been a story. Or it could have just been a local story. Or it could have been something that we saw only from a distance, through the usual filters. Instead, it gathered steam.
Millennials don’t go to rallies.
Thanks to postmodernism, we tend to see all facts as meaningless trivia, no one more vital than any other. Yet this disregard for facts qua facts is intellectually crippling. Facts are the raw material of thought, and the knowledge of significant facts makes sophisticated thought possible.
Millennials give comics the kind of adulation past generations reserved for musicians. We respect Lady Gaga. But we’ll travel hundreds of miles to touch the hem of Jon Stewart’s robe.
There is something about a mortarboard that gives otherwise sane and normal people the overwhelming urge to burden you with advice. Some of them cannot help themselves. They were asked to do it by a committee. But one can only take so many pieces of wisdom before they all start to blur together.
Obama isn’t funny.
Books are wonderful. They are like people, except they mind less when you put them down and wander off to eat something.
In general, sincerity is awkward.
I would say ‘competence’ actually might be slightly more important than passion. I understand that it is important to feel strongly about things, but give me a competent dentist over a passionate dentist any day, if only because something about the phrase ‘passionate dentist’ is deeply unnerving.
Being a person of faith is just another of a wide range of fun activities available to those who come to Harvard. When Harvard boasts to admitted students of its more than 40 religious groups, it does so in the same vein that it boasts of its nearly dozen a cappella groups.
I am a millennial. Destruction is all I know. I no longer care what I wipe from the face of the Earth.
Wilde is an invaluable acquaintance. Often, in situations where I am required to appear witty, I simply steal large chunks from his works and attempt to pass them off as my own with minor modifications.
If awkward has an antithesis, it is probably Barack Obama.
Every so often, when I am feeling plucky, I try to write a screenplay that combines all 10 of Americans’ top phobias and market it as a sleeper hit.
They will wrest ‘dull words’ from my cold dead hands.
Harvard pulsates with life and thought of all kinds, and religion should not be left out of its ongoing discussions.
MS Paint was my creative outlet for many years.
Serious beliefs are awkward, especially religious ones. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with them, it’s just that people’s real, heart-felt, deeply held beliefs are, well, ‘not easy to handle or deal with, requiring great skill, ingenuity, or care’ – in a word, awkward.
History contains heroes, but no one is a hero entirely, and no one is a hero for very long.
George Washington didn’t have to make us laugh; he just had to establish precedents and avoid chopping down more cherry trees than he could possibly help. But somewhere along the line, Americans began expecting their presidents to do more than just govern. They also had to make us laugh.
I majored in extracurriculars, honestly. I joined the Harvard Stand Up Comedy Society, which is a ragtag band of misfits. I wrote for ‘On Harvard Time,’ which was a student TV show trying to be ‘The Daily Show.’ And I wrote a humor column for ‘The Crimson’ starting my sophomore year.
The biggest way to be productive is if you’re procrastinating on another more important project.
You do not get gold stars for cleaning your toilet. In actual life, there is a depressing lack of stickers.
I think, when you’re doing a column and blogging every day, you get familiar with the sound of your own voice.
I know from personal experience that it is extremely difficult to read while you work out, especially on a Stairmaster.
When police are shutting down cameras, it is a sign that they know the truth is not going to be kind to them.
People feel compelled to continue reading and hearing the news. Sometimes, you just want somebody to be yelling at it with you as you’re reading it. I think of that as my function.
All the weird inconveniences of adult life that you thought they made up to lend excitement and color to episodes of ‘Sex and the City’ are, in fact, real.
As long as cantankerous old people have existed, they have complained that kids nowadays don’t seem to know anything.
In society at large, nerds are law-abiding, caring, fundamentally good folk who keep the wheels of civilization grinding.
All the young voters who flocked to Obama in droves grew up watching ‘The Daily Show’ and the ‘Colbert Report.’
While MIT and the University of Chicago duke it out for the title of nerdiest school, James Franco and Renee Zellweger show up at Harvard to party. Somehow, miracle of miracles, Harvard is ‘cool.’
