Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

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

Related Quotes:

" 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! "

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

" 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. "

" In general, I never think it is a good idea to try to recreate past successes. You have to strike out on your own, for better or worse. "

" 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. "

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

" 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 have always hated fancy dress parties. "

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

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

" 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? "

" 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. "

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

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

" You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure. "

" One person's barbarity is another person's civilisation. "

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

" 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?' "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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 was not much good as a waitress. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "