Alexandra Petri Quotes
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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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President Obama deserves our unalloyed praise for hastening Osama bin Laden's demise.
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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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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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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.
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The problem with technology, as with fashion, is that it's impossible to be 'in' forever.
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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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Dull words are what make many bright sentences shine. They do not call attention to themselves.
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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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At college, everyone's milestones occurred in shared clumps. Everyone studied, caroused, won, lost - simultaneously. Life is not like that.
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When police are shutting down cameras, it is a sign that they know the truth is not going to be kind to them.
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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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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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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.
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No one has debates on Twitter.
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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.
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I think, when you're doing a column and blogging every day, you get familiar with the sound of your own voice.
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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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Anything you loved, however intensely, becomes mortifying the moment you cease to love it.
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Awkward is a state of being.