Top 98 Quotes & Sayings by Alexandra Petri - Page 2

Serious beliefs are awkward, especially religious ones. It's not that there's anything wrong with them, it's just that people's real, heart-felt, deeply held beliefs are, well, 'not easy to handle or deal with, requiring great skill, ingenuity, or care' - in a word, awkward.

Hi, my name is Alexandra, and I'm a netaholic.

It's easier to find the joke in something when you think, 'This - this is ridiculous.'

I think, when you're doing a column and blogging every day, you get familiar with the sound of your own voice.

If awkward has an antithesis, it is probably Barack Obama.

At Harvard, where students tend to respond to real-world celebrities with the vague sense that they could do a better job themselves, the recipe for celebrity is complex.

Obama isn't funny.

It turns out that in order to think well, knowledge helps.

Harvard pulsates with life and thought of all kinds, and religion should not be left out of its ongoing discussions.

Some information is important, and some is not, and intelligence consists in knowing one from the other.

Journalists run many risks. It comes with the profession.

Harvard prides itself on its diversity - economic, racial, social, geographical - but it remains intellectually segregated. It's not what conservative commentators seem to imagine - a bastion of liberal professors force-feeding radical opinions to a naive student body.

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.

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.

I am a millennial. Destruction is all I know. I no longer care what I wipe from the face of the Earth.

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.

I can be serious for an hour; then I have to go lie down.

Awkward is a state of being.

A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but I think if the picture is made in MS Paint, the going rate might be slightly less.

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.

As long as I'm writing stuff and people are reading it, I'll be happy.

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.'

History contains heroes, but no one is a hero entirely, and no one is a hero for very long.

By isolating ourselves from those with whose opinions we disagree, we lose the ability to defend our beliefs.

They will wrest 'dull words' from my cold dead hands.

Harvard is nerd rehab. You have to check yourself in. Those who seek a school filled with self-proclaimed 'nerds,' seek elsewhere. Dropping the H bomb may brand you as an intellectual or a Kennedy. But it will not give you much nerd cred. And that's a good thing.

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.

All children, except two, grow up: Peter Pan and Donald Trump Jr.

Comedy and politics have a lot in common. Both are great ways to pick up chicks - just look at Governor Spitzer. Or Ellen Degeneres. Both require spending time on the road meeting strangers who often have the desire to throw things at you. Both are difficult, if not impossible, to do all alone. And both rely heavily on personality.

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.

The biggest way to be productive is if you're procrastinating on another more important project.

YouTube is covered in comments that would be better expressed - and better spelled - via a simple thumbs-up or down.

Being a person of faith is just another of a wide range of fun activities available to those who come to Harvard. When Harvard boasts to admitted students of its more than 40 religious groups, it does so in the same vein that it boasts of its nearly dozen a cappella groups.

In society at large, nerds are law-abiding, caring, fundamentally good folk who keep the wheels of civilization grinding.

Everyone praises Harvard 'for the students.' But what makes Harvard's students so great is that they are, in many ways, a cross-section of the larger world. They are normal people who happen to be excellent, and this sets them apart. People who go to Yale go because they want to attend Yale. People who go to Harvard go because they can.

No one has debates on Twitter.

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.

MS Paint was my creative outlet for many years.