Top 98 Quotes & Sayings by Alexandra Petri

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American journalist Alexandra Petri.

Last updated on December 3, 2024.

Alexandra Attkisson Petri is an American humorist and newspaper columnist. In 2010, she became the youngest person to have a column in The Washington Post. Petri runs the ComPost blog on the paper's website, on which she formerly worked with Dana Milbank. In 2017, a piece of satire she wrote about president Donald Trump was miscategorized as news and included in one of the White House's daily press briefings. She was recognized in the Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2018.

American - Journalist

Source: Wikipedia

Good laughs melt out of memory pretty quickly.

Alexandra Petri

One of the things I try to do - and I always regret when I'm not doing it - is I try to read as much as possible as I'm consuming news.

Alexandra Petri

All the young voters who flocked to Obama in droves grew up watching 'The Daily Show' and the 'Colbert Report.'

Alexandra Petri

How many stories do you know about people cooped up in places because of deep snowfall? How many stories where something good happens to those people?

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

A picture can hide as much as it reveals.

Alexandra Petri

I love Gene Weingarten's feature writing with the passion of a thousand suns.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

The worst thing that happens to you at college if you fail to get out of bed in time is that you will miss two hours of someone reading scintillating anecdotes about Medieval Ireland. The worst thing that happens to you in life if you fail to get out of bed in time is that you might lose your job as a first responder.

Alexandra Petri

At Harvard, people like to impart the idea that you are a mover and shaker.

Alexandra Petri

It is possible to assemble a narrative for yourself, brokenly, on social media, only seeing what you want to look at.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

In high school, you at least have to get up at a reasonable hour and show up at places on time. College, on the other hand, gave me the sense that I could complete major assignments at 2 A.M. without suffering any repercussions, along with the erroneous idea that in real life, things started after one in the afternoon.

Alexandra Petri

Bad things happen, and you can only be so prepared.

Alexandra Petri

At college, everyone's milestones occurred in shared clumps. Everyone studied, caroused, won, lost - simultaneously. Life is not like that.

Alexandra Petri

My goal is to be weirder than everybody else and hope that no one stops me. So far, no one has.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

Books are wonderful. They are like people, except they mind less when you put them down and wander off to eat something.

Alexandra Petri

People talk to pass the time, share information, and entertain each other.

Alexandra Petri

I swear like a sailor, assuming the sailor in question died in 1800 and was really square.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

Dull words are what make many bright sentences shine. They do not call attention to themselves.

Alexandra Petri

In general, sincerity is awkward.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

The difference between face-to-face conversation and any other medium of communication is simple: No distractions are permitted.

Alexandra Petri

Once, as my New Year's Resolution, I telephoned the Extenze Male Enhancement hotline every day for a month.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

The problem with technology, as with fashion, is that it's impossible to be 'in' forever.

Alexandra Petri

People feel compelled to continue reading and hearing the news. Sometimes, you just want somebody to be yelling at it with you as you're reading it. I think of that as my function.

Alexandra Petri

Millennials don't go to rallies.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

Pleasure reading has long been an American ideal - generations of schoolchildren have headed home for the summer toting recreational reading lists. But try to pitch it to a group of non-readers, and they quickly become suspicious.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

When police are shutting down cameras, it is a sign that they know the truth is not going to be kind to them.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

President Obama deserves our unalloyed praise for hastening Osama bin Laden's demise.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

I know from personal experience that it is extremely difficult to read while you work out, especially on a Stairmaster.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

Nearly everything faith-related that I have done at Harvard has been followed by free food, from going to services at Harvard's Episcopal Chaplaincy to attending a day of interfaith discussion and dialogue hosted by the university chaplains in the fall.

Alexandra Petri

Snow is like a manic pixie dream girl: fun and whimsical when you encounter it only through the barrier of a movie screen - but absolute misery to have to put up with in real life.

Alexandra Petri

You do not get gold stars for cleaning your toilet. In actual life, there is a depressing lack of stickers.

Alexandra Petri

The desire for attention has become a primal need along the lines of food, water, and clothing.

Alexandra Petri

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?'

Alexandra Petri

Every so often, when I am feeling plucky, I try to write a screenplay that combines all 10 of Americans' top phobias and market it as a sleeper hit.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

Anything you loved, however intensely, becomes mortifying the moment you cease to love it.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

Forced to confront a reptile or an international financial crisis, I'll take the reptile every time.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

As long as cantankerous old people have existed, they have complained that kids nowadays don't seem to know anything.

Alexandra Petri

Once you start worrying, it's hard to stop.

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

Almost nothing anyone told me about Harvard has been accurate.

Alexandra Petri