Mary Beard Quotes
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I was into Black Power, and my practice Oxbridge essay was a rant. The headmistress said I'd never get in with that, but she was probably wrong. I was the ideal combination: a swot who was also a bad girl.
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In real life, Oxford and Cambridge are two excellent universities, like many others in the country. They are full of highly intelligent, hard-working, and quite ordinary students and teachers.
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It would have been nice if the people who were criticising 'Civilizations' had actually watched it. But the popular response has been tremendous, and in the end, that's what really matters.
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English country towns are often seen as a cultural wasteland, but the more cut off you are, the more the need to create things, to make your own culture.
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Democracy requires information. Plato knew that informed decision-making requires knowledge.
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I'm exploring the long history of women, first of all, being silenced and, secondly, not being taken seriously in the political and public sphere. It's a call to action through understanding and through looking at ourselves again and trying to reformulate the whole question of women and power.
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I think most people gain some sense of how to look at a painting, but no one ever teaches you how to look at a piece of silver.
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When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.
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I have lots of heroes and heroines, mostly unsung and including my husband.
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If being a decent soul is being maternal, then fine.
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I've chosen to be this way because that's how I feel comfortable with myself. That's how I am. It's about joining up the dots between how you look and how you feel inside, and I think that's what I've done, and I think people do it differently.
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No women in ancient Rome ever had the vote.
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What politicians do is they never get the rhetoric wrong, and the price they pay is they don't speak the truth as they see it. Now, I will speak truth as I see it, and sometimes I don't get the rhetoric right. I think that's a fair trade-off.
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For whatever reason, some sorts of women's silence were broken by MeToo. This is the optimistic bit. And that will lead to a much more careful attention to women's voices.
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I'm an academic. I argue; I engage with people.
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I have always thought the women's movement traded too much on outrage and not enough on ridicule.
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You can't always worry about offending people.
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You can hardly be a classicist and not be interested in theatre.
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The building blocks of discrimination tend to be similar wherever you find them.
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What is the role of an academic - no matter what they're teaching - within political debate? It has to be that they make issues more complicated. The role of the academic is to make everything less simple.
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I'd quite like to be in Caligula's court - living in the back room somewhere and just being able to observe.
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I'm actually in a tradition of classicists with a big public face who like sounding off.
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If you ask me what is civilisation, it's little more than an act of faith.
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I would summarise my politics very simply as the maverick left and proud.