Quotes from Mary Beard

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

The gloomiest way of describing the ancient world is it is misogyny from A to Z, really.

However judicious academics may be - not like me - they are all taught to see through crap.

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.

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

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

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

Fate has it in for me to be an exhibit: that funny old lady from the telly.

When you look at me on the telly and say, 'She should be on 'The Undateables,'' you are looking at a 59-year-old woman. That is what 59-year-old women who have not had work done look like. Get it?

If you say to a group of women professors, 'Close your eyes and think of a professor,' what they will see is a guy. I will. And I'll stop myself and think, 'Hey, hang on, what am I doing here?'

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.

At 16, I got into local-education archaeology classes - you got to go to summer digs. It allowed me to be both intellectual and a bad girl with a wicked social life every evening!

The history of art is not just the history of artists; it is also the history of the people who viewed art. And that wider perspective can help us see some of the reasons why the art of the ancient world should still matter to us.

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.'

It's a bit naff, but there is something exciting about pulling a bit of pottery out of the ground that's 2,000 years old.

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.

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.

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.

Grey is my hair colour. I really can't see why I should change it.

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

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.

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 knew that Trump was ghastly. I knew I'd vote for Hillary if I had a vote.