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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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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The desire for attention has become a primal need along the lines of food, water, and clothing.
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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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At college, everyone's milestones occurred in shared clumps. Everyone studied, caroused, won, lost - simultaneously. Life is not like that.
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The problem with technology, as with fashion, is that it's impossible to be 'in' forever.
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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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Dull words are what make many bright sentences shine. They do not call attention to themselves.
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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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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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Any promising young white man rich enough to theoretically afford a giant oil painting of himself gets to remain young and innocent forever, and none of his actions have any consequences, whether there is magic involved or not.
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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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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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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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Awkward is a state of being.
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Anything you loved, however intensely, becomes mortifying the moment you cease to love it.
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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.