Mary Beard Quotes
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There is no way, absolutely no way, that I would want people to stop reading the 'Odyssey.' But I want them to read it with their eyes open. To notice it and then to think what it says about us.
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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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It wasn't until I got to Cambridge that I discovered active discrimination against women.
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History is how we have learnt to think about ourselves. It's not as though the Greeks and Romans are static entities out there to be discovered and translated. We make them speak, we talk to them, and they inform what we say.
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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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The gloomiest way of describing the ancient world is it is misogyny from A to Z, really.
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Democracy requires information. Plato knew that informed decision-making requires knowledge.
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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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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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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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The building blocks of discrimination tend to be similar wherever you find them.
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When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.
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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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In general, I never think it is a good idea to try to recreate past successes. You have to strike out on your own, for better or worse.
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You can hardly be a classicist and not be interested in theatre.
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You can't always worry about offending people.
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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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I receive something we might euphemistically call an 'inappropriately hostile' response - that is to say, more than fair criticism or even fair anger - every time I speak on radio or television.
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A lot of sexism is just very silly... and the best response is laughter and ridicule.
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I would summarise my politics very simply as the maverick left and proud.
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If being a decent soul is being maternal, then fine.
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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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One person's barbarity is another person's civilisation.