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. ”

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. ”

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

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

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

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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