106 Quotes by Alexandra Petri

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

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?'

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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