Alexandra Petri Quotes
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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.
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There should be no real difficulty in condemning Nazis, white supremacists, and the Ku Klux Klan. They are, for God's sake, Nazis and white supremacists. This should not require moral courage. This is obvious. This is the moral equivalent of the text you type to prove you're not a robot.
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History contains heroes, but no one is a hero entirely, and no one is a hero for very long.
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As long as cantankerous old people have existed, they have complained that kids nowadays don't seem to know anything.
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By isolating ourselves from those with whose opinions we disagree, we lose the ability to defend our beliefs.
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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.
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The biggest way to be productive is if you're procrastinating on another more important project.
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I know from personal experience that it is extremely difficult to read while you work out, especially on a Stairmaster.
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All that time that we spend tweeting our thoughts and emotions to our next of kin, we could be writing the great American novel, starting a business, or just living.
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As long as I'm writing stuff and people are reading it, I'll be happy.
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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.
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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.
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My goal is to be weirder than everybody else and hope that no one stops me. So far, no one has.
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In general, sincerity is awkward.
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MS Paint was my creative outlet for many years.
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Everyone praises Harvard 'for the students.' But what makes Harvard's students so great is that they are, in many ways, a cross-section of the larger world. They are normal people who happen to be excellent, and this sets them apart. People who go to Yale go because they want to attend Yale. People who go to Harvard go because they can.
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Journalists run many risks. It comes with the profession.
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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?'
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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.
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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.
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Yale students want to impress you with what they're doing. Harvard students want to impress you with how cool they look while doing it.
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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.
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Stereotyped as convention-going, pocket-protector-wearing, chess-playing, infrequently-showering types, nerds are one of our society's most ridiculed groups. And, for a university with an international reputation as a bastion of intellectualism, Harvard is startlingly devoid of them.
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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.