Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" 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. "

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

Mary Beard

Ancient

Conversation

Talk

" In real life, Oxford and Cambridge are two excellent universities, like many others in the country. They are full of highly intelligent, hard-working, and quite ordinary students and teachers. "

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

" I was into Black Power, and my practice Oxbridge essay was a rant. The headmistress said I'd never get in with that, but she was probably wrong. I was the ideal combination: a swot who was also a bad girl. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

Mary Beard

You

Ask

" 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

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

" There is nothing inherently conservative in the ancient world. "

" 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. "

" There is no way, absolutely no way, that I would want people to stop reading the 'Odyssey.' But I want them to read it with their eyes open. To notice it and then to think what it says about us. "

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

" 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. "

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

" I was really good at Latin at school, and because I was good at it, I got more interested and got better at it. "

Mary Beard

Good

School

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" What I find very interesting is, we're not enthralled by the ancient world, and we've escaped all kinds of ancient preconceptions and assumptions and prejudices. But, nevertheless, we still make that connection between authoritative speech and male speech. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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?' "

" Barring some sociopaths, probably, there is nobody who doesn't care about their appearance. "

" I have always hated fancy dress parties. "

" 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. "

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