Alexandra Petri Quotes
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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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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.
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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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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.
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MS Paint was my creative outlet for many years.
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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.
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I can be serious for an hour; then I have to go lie down.
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As long as I'm writing stuff and people are reading it, I'll be happy.
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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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No generation has escaped it - one morning, your skill with the eight-track or the record player or the cotton gin suddenly ceases to impress. It's just one of those inevitable disappointments that come with growing up, like the realization that Santa doesn't exist or the way that music always takes a turn for the worse after you turn 30.
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Some information is important, and some is not, and intelligence consists in knowing one from the other.
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Forced to confront a reptile or an international financial crisis, I'll take the reptile every time.
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No matter how successful you are, no matter how good you are at what you do, even if a golden path rolls out in front of your feet your whole life, there will come one particularly bleak Tuesday when you glance over at Facebook and notice that Jen From Down The Hall has just won an Oscar.
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Obama isn't funny.
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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.
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The difference between face-to-face conversation and any other medium of communication is simple: No distractions are permitted.
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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.
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People talk to pass the time, share information, and entertain each other.
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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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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.
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It is possible to assemble a narrative for yourself, brokenly, on social media, only seeing what you want to look at.
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In general, sincerity is awkward.
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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.'
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President Obama deserves our unalloyed praise for hastening Osama bin Laden's demise.