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" 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. "

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" Thinking through how you look to your enemies is helpful. That doesn't mean that your ideology is wrong and theirs is right, but maybe you have to recognise that they have one - and that it may be logically coherent. Which may be uncomfortable. "

Mary Beard

Look

Thinking

Mean

" 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? "

Mary Beard

Women

Woman

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

" 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?' "

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

" There is no argument that I won't take seriously. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Mary Beard

Old Lady

Old

" My day job is working on Roman history and ancient Roman history. "

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

" You always regret upsetting people needlessly. "

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

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

" One of its most powerful weapons has always been 'barbarity': 'we' know that 'we' are civilised by contrasting ourselves with those we deem to be un-civilised, with those who do not - or cannot be trusted to - share our values. "

" 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.' "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

Mary Beard

Early

School

" In 1984, I returned to Newnham College at Cambridge University to teach after completing my Ph.D. there a couple of years earlier. Almost all of my colleagues in the university's classics department were men, and my office at the all-women's college was in the dorm. "

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

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

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

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

Mary Beard

Big

Face

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There's plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain. "

" You have to do what you feel comfortable with. "