Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

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! "

Mary Beard

Evening

Girl

Life

" I don't think that we are completely dominated by what we have inherited from the past, but it is the case that as far back as you can go - just to Homer, but also to the literature of Rome, the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance - what you will find is that women's voices are not taken seriously. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" I was not much good as a waitress. "

" What is the role of an academic - no matter what they're teaching - within political debate? It has to be that they make issues more complicated. The role of the academic is to make everything less simple. "

" My mom was born before women had the vote in general elections in England. "

" 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. "

" You can hardly be a classicist and not be interested in theatre. "

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

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

" You can't always worry about offending people. "

" 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. "

" When I am making a TV show, I am looking for engagement, not admiration. "

" The web is democratising and also the voice of people who don't think they have another outlet. And that voice can be punitive. "

" 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. "

Mary Beard

Women

Thumb

" We lived in the schoolhouse of the village school in Church Preen, in deepest Shropshire, and my mum was the schoolmistress. She taught the juniors, and one other teacher taught the infants. I went there from the age of three, no doubt as a form of childcare. "

" You don't overturn x-thousand years of patriarchy in a generation. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" My fantasy is going into a men's loo. And listening to what they say. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" If you ask me what is civilisation, it's little more than an act of faith. "

Mary Beard

You

Ask