Quotes from Mary Beard

These attitudes, assumptions and prejudices are hard-wired into us: not into our brains (there is no neurological reason for us to hear low-pitched voices as more authoritative than high-pitched ones), but into our culture, our language and millennia of our history.

More interesting is another cultural connection this reveals: that unpopular, controversial or just plain different views when voiced by a woman are taken as indications of her stupidity. It is not that you disagree, it is that she is stupid.

Other classical writers insisted that the tone and timbre of women's speech always threatened to subvert not just the voice of the male orator but also the social and political stability, the health, of the whole state.

La verità è che i Classici sono in declino per definizione [...] La sensazione di una perdita imminente, il perenne timore che gli studi classici stiano per scomparire per sempre è ciò che [...] conferisce a queste discipline l'energia e la tensione di cui ritengo siano ancora intrise.

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.

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.

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.

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

We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women's silence.

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

There is nothing inherently conservative in the ancient world.

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.

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.

I would summarise my politics very simply as the maverick left and proud.

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.

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

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

I'm very interested in how people in the 19th century travelled to Greece.

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.

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

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

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.

I think that what will help women get into positions of power - well, day nurseries, equal pay, family-friendly working hours. And I think all that's important. I used to think it was the solution. I now think it's enabling, and it's important, but still we have got head work to do about this.