Alexandra Petri

Journalist

98 Quotes

YouTube is covered in comments that would be better expressed - and better spelled - via a simple thumbs-up or down.

If awkward has an antithesis, it is probably Barack Obama.

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.

Hi, my name is Alexandra, and I'm a netaholic.

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.

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.

It is possible to assemble a narrative for yourself, brokenly, on social media, only seeing what you want to look at.

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.

At Harvard, people like to impart the idea that you are a mover and shaker.

By isolating ourselves from those with whose opinions we disagree, we lose the ability to defend our beliefs.

In general, sincerity is awkward.

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 you're doing what you do because you love it, you have room to be happy for others. And that's a lot of fun, when you get down to it.

As long as cantankerous old people have existed, they have complained that kids nowadays don't seem to know anything.

Harvard is nerd rehab. You have to check yourself in. Those who seek a school filled with self-proclaimed 'nerds,' seek elsewhere. Dropping the H bomb may brand you as an intellectual or a Kennedy. But it will not give you much nerd cred. And that's a good thing.

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.

I swear like a sailor, assuming the sailor in question died in 1800 and was really square.

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