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" 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. "

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" 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. "

Mary Beard

Price

Speak

Politicians

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

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

" 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

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

" 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! "

" When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice. "

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

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

" I think that what will help women get into positions of power - well, day nurseries, equal pay, family-friendly working hours. And I think all that's important. I used to think it was the solution. I now think it's enabling, and it's important, but still we have got head work to do about this. "

" A lot of sexism is just very silly... and the best response is laughter and ridicule. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Wherever possible, I try to see things from the other side of the dividing line and to read civilisation 'against the grain.' "

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

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

Mary Beard

Big

Face

" 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. "

" I do not think that the lives of women of my generation, as a class, were blighted by the way the power differentials between men and women operated. We wanted to change those power differentials; we also had a good time. "

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

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

" You always regret upsetting people needlessly. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" The thing about being a university teacher is that you're fairly tolerant about young people saying things they shouldn't have said. "

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

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

Mary Beard

Clever

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