Alexandra Petri Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Alexandra Petri:

In general, sincerity is awkward.

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.'

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

Alexandra Petri

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

Alexandra Petri

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.

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

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

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri

Good laughs melt out of memory pretty quickly.

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

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

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

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.

Alexandra Petri

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

Alexandra Petri

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

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

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

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

Alexandra Petri

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

Alexandra Petri

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

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

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

Alexandra Petri

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.

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

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

Awkward is a state of being.

Alexandra Petri

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

Alexandra Petri

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

Alexandra Petri

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

Alexandra Petri

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.

Alexandra Petri