Mary Beard Quotes
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You can hardly be a classicist and not be interested in theatre.
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We are sold the idea of a refugee as a tiny child sitting crying, as a way of raising money, but elderly ladies and kids largely can't move. The demographic is mostly young men.
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There's a basic rule of thumb that the more a culture oppresses women, or oppresses anyone, the more culturally preoccupied they are with that.
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Democracy requires information. Plato knew that informed decision-making requires knowledge.
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You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.
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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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The gloomiest way of describing the ancient world is it is misogyny from A to Z, really.
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I was 11 when I started Latin - not like boys, who start early at prep school. At 14, you had to choose whether to start Greek and drop German, but my mum made a fuss, and I took Latin, Greek, French, and German at O-level, which meant I didn't do much science.
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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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I don't want to see a world in which women can communicate on Twitter, but their actual voices are not heard.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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The building blocks of discrimination tend to be similar wherever you find them.
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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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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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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 would summarise my politics very simply as the maverick left and proud.
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I do not think that the lives of women of my generation, as a class, were blighted by the way the power differentials between men and women operated. We wanted to change those power differentials; we also had a good time.
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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'm an academic. I argue; I engage with people.