Alexandra Petri Quotes
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It turns out that in order to think well, knowledge helps.
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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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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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Obama isn't funny.
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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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MS Paint was my creative outlet for many years.
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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.
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Books are wonderful. They are like people, except they mind less when you put them down and wander off to eat something.
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The desire for attention has become a primal need along the lines of food, water, and clothing.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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In general, sincerity is awkward.
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All the young voters who flocked to Obama in droves grew up watching 'The Daily Show' and the 'Colbert Report.'
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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President Obama deserves our unalloyed praise for hastening Osama bin Laden's demise.