Top 105 Quotes & Sayings by Mary Beard

Playing around with other people's husbands when you were 17 was bad news. Yes, I was a very naughty girl.

The thing about being a university teacher is that you're fairly tolerant about young people saying things they shouldn't have said.

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.

The building blocks of discrimination tend to be similar wherever you find them.

You can't always worry about offending people.

Gender is a key marker of power and powerlessness. Most of the structures of how our world works are biased in terms of men.

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.

I'd quite like to be in Caligula's court - living in the back room somewhere and just being able to observe.

What I find very interesting is, we're not enthralled by the ancient world, and we've escaped all kinds of ancient preconceptions and assumptions and prejudices. But, nevertheless, we still make that connection between authoritative speech and male speech.

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.

I remember plastering the kitchen with Black Power pictures of Angela Davis.

It's great fun being an academic because you have a certain licence to be a bit of a joker.

We make two mistakes about the ancient world. One is to assume they were better than us - that, for instance, the ancient Olympics didn't involve money-making. The opposite mistake, and just as common, is to think our Olympics are much more civilised than ancient sporting competitions. Neither is true.

I have lots of heroes and heroines, mostly unsung and including my husband.

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.

Beard's secret is always to be slightly on the edge but to pull back from disaster at the last minute.

One of the great things about history is that it sort of isn't a done deal - ever. The historical texts and the historical evidence that you use is always somehow giving you different answers because you're asking it different questions.

Nobody but an idiot would pretend that they had an error-proof way of choosing the 'best' out of hundreds of perfectly qualified applicants - not for university or for anything.

If being a decent soul is being maternal, then fine.

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.

When I am making a TV show, I am looking for engagement, not admiration.

Wherever possible, I try to see things from the other side of the dividing line and to read civilisation 'against the grain.'

I think, when I was 25, nobody in the world knew who I was.

When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.

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.

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.

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.

A lot of sexism is just very silly... and the best response is laughter and ridicule.

Democracy requires information. Plato knew that informed decision-making requires knowledge.

The web is democratising and also the voice of people who don't think they have another outlet. And that voice can be punitive.

A lot of people will always say, 'I really know nothing about the ancient world.' But there's lots and lots of things people know. Partly, they've been encouraged to think they're ignorant about it. In some ways, the job to do is show people that they know much more than they'd like to admit.

Roman military tactics were much over-rated. All the clever ones had the same idea, which was to go round the back.

I loved 'Gladiator,' and I thought its depiction of gladiatorial combat, although it was an aggrandizing picture, was cleverly and expertly done.

I have always thought the women's movement traded too much on outrage and not enough on ridicule.

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.

Classics isn't about the ancient world. It's partly about the ancient world, but it's about our conversation. It's how we try to talk to antiquity.

It wasn't until I got to Cambridge that I discovered active discrimination against women.

I'm actually in a tradition of classicists with a big public face who like sounding off.

The reason why the British theatrical tradition is world-leading in Greek drama is because there is a flourishing tradition of people rethinking Greek tragedy.

My mother took me to the British Museum aged five. I had thought people from the past weren't as good as we were, and then I saw the Elgin marbles. Suddenly, the world seemed more complicated.

I have always hated fancy dress parties.

All religions throughout history have been concerned about - and have sometimes fought over - what it means to represent God, and they have found elegant, intriguing, and awkward ways to confront that dilemma.

I was not much good as a waitress.

People who exploit others come to spend an enormous amount of energy wondering about and justifying that exploitation.

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.

No women in ancient Rome ever had the vote.

I don't want to see a world in which women can communicate on Twitter, but their actual voices are not heard.

I think you have to realize that most ancient warfare is really kind of hit and run, honestly. You go and you bash down the walls of some enemy 50 miles away and you take some slaves, you take some cattle, probably a bit of cash too, and then you say goodbye and go home and you probably do the same thing next year - or try to, or they do it to you.

There is nothing inherently conservative in the ancient world.

Greek myths, early Roman history, is configured around violence against women. And I think we need to get in there, get our hands dirty, face it, and see why and how it was.

One of the downsides of working in antiquity is that you don't have many female voices, but you certainly have a lot of male terror about the potential of women's power. It shows you very clearly that the most oppressive cultures tend to be afraid of those whom they oppress.

I was really good at Latin at school, and because I was good at it, I got more interested and got better at it.

If talking about arts means being pretentious, a bit like being a wine critic, then I don't feel comfy with that. You can get a lot from paintings without getting mystical about brush strokes.

Whatever you say about popular culture, people like people who know things, who are experts, and it doesn't particularly matter what they look like.

I used to think that the British press were particularly awful to Cherie Blair. I think Blair's foreign policy was a complete disaster, but the British press, when they wanted to explain why Blair took unexpected moves, they did create Cherie as the power behind the throne.

If women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?

You don't overturn x-thousand years of patriarchy in a generation.

What interests me is the idea that classics is actually quite democratic. It isn't only the toff, upper-class subject it's often thought to be. Every generation enjoys rediscovering it.

I was nearly struck by lightning on an excavation in Turkey.

I'm not in the slightest wanting to attack the women's movement here. But I think that in popular, broadly left-wing, broadly feminist discourse, there is a tendency to just label discrimination against women - and embedded assumptions about them - as misogyny and think 'job done.'