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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. "

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" 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. "

Mary Beard

History

Over

God

" 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. "

" I've chosen to be this way because that's how I feel comfortable with myself. That's how I am. It's about joining up the dots between how you look and how you feel inside, and I think that's what I've done, and I think people do it differently. "

" 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

Back

" 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. "

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

" 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! "

" 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. "

" I have lots of heroes and heroines, mostly unsung and including my husband. "

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

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

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

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

" I'd quite like to be in Caligula's court - living in the back room somewhere and just being able to observe. "

Mary Beard

Somewhere

Room

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" It's a bit naff, but there is something exciting about pulling a bit of pottery out of the ground that's 2,000 years old. "

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

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

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Mary Beard

Through

See