Alexandra Petri Quotes

At Harvard, where students tend to respond to real-world celebrities with the vague sense that they could do a better job themselves, the recipe for celebrity is complex.

Obama isn’t funny.

My goal is to be weirder than everybody else and hope that no one stops me. So far, no one has.

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.

You can be brilliant in some ways and despicable in others. You can be a clean, upright, moral individual in your private life who never swears, treats women with respect, and speaks highly of duty and honor – and go out every day and dedicate yourself to a cause that makes the world worse.

My first summer in college, I interned for Arena Stage in D.C. and taught a disastrous class on standup comedy to middle schoolers at the Arena Stage camp. I had never taught anything before, and needless to say, I quickly lost control of the class.

Bad things happen, and you can only be so prepared.

All the young voters who flocked to Obama in droves grew up watching ‘The Daily Show’ and the ‘Colbert Report.’

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.

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

Worst case scenario, nothing I do has any value or purpose, but if I can make someone laugh, I’m at least as useful as a piece of quiche would be.

Millennials don’t go to rallies.

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.

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.

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.

Once, as my New Year’s Resolution, I telephoned the Extenze Male Enhancement hotline every day for a month.

Dull words are what make many bright sentences shine. They do not call attention to themselves.

I am a millennial. Destruction is all I know. I no longer care what I wipe from the face of the Earth.

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.

A picture can hide as much as it reveals.

Anything you loved, however intensely, becomes mortifying the moment you cease to love it.

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

People talk to pass the time, share information, and entertain each other.

President Obama deserves our unalloyed praise for hastening Osama bin Laden’s demise.

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.

Once you start worrying, it’s hard to stop.

In general, sincerity is awkward.

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.

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.

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.

The desire for attention has become a primal need along the lines of food, water, and clothing.

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.

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.’

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.

Journalists run many risks. It comes with the profession.

As long as I’m writing stuff and people are reading it, I’ll be happy.

Although no one explicitly wants a president who could have a reliable fall back career in stand-up comedy, everyone shudders at the thought of a Rutherford B. Hayes or John Kerry.

Standup comedy was my weird hobby. I would drag my poor parents out to the only open mics that were in coffee shops instead of bars. I’d get up and go, ‘Hi, I’m 17, and I have jokes about matriculation!’ At the time I was like, ‘Why is no one laughing?’

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

The problem with technology, as with fashion, is that it’s impossible to be ‘in’ forever.

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.

Some information is important, and some is not, and intelligence consists in knowing one from the other.

It’s easier to find the joke in something when you think, ‘This – this is ridiculous.’

The difference between face-to-face conversation and any other medium of communication is simple: No distractions are permitted.

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 think, when you’re doing a column and blogging every day, you get familiar with the sound of your own voice.

Forced to confront a reptile or an international financial crisis, I’ll take the reptile every time.

Harvard is a wondrously tolerant climate for debate and exchange among a wide variety of thoughts, backgrounds, and beliefs, but the voice of religion on campus is largely inaudible.

Success is like food caught in your teeth: much more noticeable when it happens to other people. If it happens to you, other people have to take you aside and say something.

I tend to process stuff by making jokes about it. It’s something that makes me annoying to be around in times of real crisis.

George W. Bush has dutifully, if not intentionally, provided Americans with laughs for nearly a decade. He has also made them cry, sometimes for the same reason.

History contains heroes, but no one is a hero entirely, and no one is a hero for very long.

It turns out that in order to think well, knowledge helps.

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.