Best 16 quotes of Mary Beard on MyQuotes

Action without study is fatal.

Fame is fickle. If the media turn against me, I will just have more time in the library. Not bad as a fate.

If being a decent soul is being maternal, then fine. I'll call it human.

It doesn’t much matter what line of argument you take as a woman. If you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It’s not what you say that prompts it - it’s the fact that you are saying it.

There's a difference between what I would like to have been and what I would have been. I always fantasized about being a reforming judge or prison governor (I think that the UK penal system is a disgrace) - but it's fantasy.

But in every way, the shared metaphors we use of female access to power - 'knocking on the door', 'storming the citadel', 'smashing the glass ceiling', or just giving them a 'leg up' - underline female exteriority. Women in power are seen as breaking down barriers, or alternatively as taking something to which they are not quite entitled.

His supporters dubbed him pater patriae, or 'father of the fatherland', one of the most splendid and satisfying titles you could have in a highly patriarchal society.

Hunting, bathing, gaming, laughing: that's living (venari lavare ludere ridere occest vivere).

I do wonder if, in some places, the presence of large numbers of women in parliament means that parliament is where the power is not.

It was not all quite so simple, that real equality between women and men was still a thing of the future, and that there were causes for anger as well as for celebration.

It was then that he gained the nickname adulescentulus carnifex: 'kid butcher' rather than enfant terrible.

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.

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: ‘Sorry, love, you just don’t understand.

One of its (civilisations) most powerful weapons has always been 'barbarity': 'we' know that 'we' are civilised by contrasting ourselves with those we deem to be uncivilised, with those who do not -or cannot be trusted to - share our values. Civilisation is a process of exclusion as well as inclusion. The boundary between 'us' and 'them' may be an internal one (for much of world history the idea of a 'civilised woman' has been a contradiction in terms), or an external one, as the word 'barbarian' suggests; it was originally a derogatory and ethnocentric ancient Greek term for foreigners you could not understand, because they spoke in an incomprehensible babble: 'bar-bar-bar ...' The inconvenient truth, of course, is that so-called 'barbarians' may be no more than those with a different view from ourselves of what it is to be civilised, and of what matters in human culture. In the end, one person's barbarity is another person's civilisation.

This time the senators met in the temple of the goddess Concord, or Harmony, a sure sign that affairs of state were anything but harmonious.

Triumphantly, he announced their deaths to the cheering crowd in a famous one-word euphemism: vixere, 'they have lived' – that is, 'they're dead'.