Welcome to a collection of insightful and thought-provoking quotes by Mary Beard, a prominent figure in the world of classical studies and history. Mary Beard is renowned for her expertise in ancient history, particularly Roman civilization, and her ability to make the past come alive through her engaging writing and commentary. As a classicist and public intellectual, Beard has contributed significantly to our understanding of antiquity and its relevance to contemporary society.
With her unique perspective and sharp wit, Mary Beard offers profound insights into various aspects of ancient history, shedding light on themes such as power, politics, gender, and identity. Through her books, lectures, and media appearances, Beard challenges conventional interpretations of the past and encourages audiences to critically examine historical narratives. Her work transcends academia, resonating with readers and listeners from all walks of life, and inspiring a deeper appreciation for the complexities of human civilization.
Below, you’ll find a selection of Mary Beard quotes that capture her intellect, humor, and wisdom. Whether you’re a student of history, a curious reader, or someone simply seeking inspiration, these quotes offer a glimpse into the mind of one of the most influential voices in classical studies. Feel free to use these quotes to create images, share on social media, or contemplate their significance in your own journey of understanding.
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. Mary Beard
You don’t overturn x-thousand years of patriarchy in a generation. Mary Beard
Gender is a key marker of power and powerlessness. Most of the structures of how our world works are biased in terms of men. Mary Beard
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
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. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
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
I have lots of heroes and heroines, mostly unsung and including my husband. Mary Beard
What interests me is the idea that classics is actually quite democratic. It isn’t only the toff, upper-class subject it’s often thought to be. Every generation enjoys rediscovering it. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
I’m actually in a tradition of classicists with a big public face who like sounding off. Mary Beard
You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure. Mary Beard
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
Roman military tactics were much over-rated. All the clever ones had the same idea, which was to go round the back. Mary Beard
I’m exploring the long history of women, first of all, being silenced and, secondly, not being taken seriously in the political and public sphere. It’s a call to action through understanding and through looking at ourselves again and trying to reformulate the whole question of women and power. Mary Beard
You can’t always worry about offending people. Mary Beard
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
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.’ Mary Beard
People who exploit others come to spend an enormous amount of energy wondering about and justifying that exploitation. Mary Beard
My mom was born before women had the vote in general elections in England. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
I would summarise my politics very simply as the maverick left and proud. Mary Beard
The web is democratising and also the voice of people who don’t think they have another outlet. And that voice can be punitive. Mary Beard
It’s great fun being an academic because you have a certain licence to be a bit of a joker. Mary Beard
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
I used to think that the British press were particularly awful to Cherie Blair. I think Blair’s foreign policy was a complete disaster, but the British press, when they wanted to explain why Blair took unexpected moves, they did create Cherie as the power behind the throne. Mary Beard
If you ask me what is civilisation, it’s little more than an act of faith. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
I’m very interested in how people in the 19th century travelled to Greece. Mary Beard
When I am making a TV show, I am looking for engagement, not admiration. Mary Beard
There’s plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
No women in ancient Rome ever had the vote. Mary Beard
One person’s barbarity is another person’s civilisation. Mary Beard
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?’ Mary Beard
When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
Beard’s secret is always to be slightly on the edge but to pull back from disaster at the last minute. Mary Beard
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
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. Mary Beard
Fate has it in for me to be an exhibit: that funny old lady from the telly. Mary Beard
A lot of sexism is just very silly… and the best response is laughter and ridicule. Mary Beard
Greek myths, early Roman history, is configured around violence against women. And I think we need to get in there, get our hands dirty, face it, and see why and how it was. Mary Beard
Wherever possible, I try to see things from the other side of the dividing line and to read civilisation ‘against the grain.’ Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
I was nearly struck by lightning on an excavation in Turkey. Mary Beard
I’d quite like to be in Caligula’s court – living in the back room somewhere and just being able to observe. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
The building blocks of discrimination tend to be similar wherever you find them. Mary Beard
A lot of people will always say, ‘I really know nothing about the ancient world.’ But there’s lots and lots of things people know. Partly, they’ve been encouraged to think they’re ignorant about it. In some ways, the job to do is show people that they know much more than they’d like to admit. Mary Beard
I think, when I was 25, nobody in the world knew who I was. Mary Beard
Democracy requires information. Plato knew that informed decision-making requires knowledge. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
My day job is working on Roman history and ancient Roman history. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
I don’t want to see a world in which women can communicate on Twitter, but their actual voices are not heard. Mary Beard
The gloomiest way of describing the ancient world is it is misogyny from A to Z, really. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
There is no argument that I won’t take seriously. Mary Beard
We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women’s silence. Mary Beard
You have to do what you feel comfortable with. Mary Beard
I have always hated fancy dress parties. Mary Beard
I receive something we might euphemistically call an ‘inappropriately hostile’ response – that is to say, more than fair criticism or even fair anger – every time I speak on radio or television. Mary Beard
I loved ‘Gladiator,’ and I thought its depiction of gladiatorial combat, although it was an aggrandizing picture, was cleverly and expertly done. Mary Beard
The reason why the British theatrical tradition is world-leading in Greek drama is because there is a flourishing tradition of people rethinking Greek tragedy. Mary Beard
My fantasy is going into a men’s loo. And listening to what they say. Mary Beard
If being a decent soul is being maternal, then fine. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
I have always thought the women’s movement traded too much on outrage and not enough on ridicule. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
Grey is my hair colour. I really can’t see why I should change it. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
It wasn’t until I got to Cambridge that I discovered active discrimination against women. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
The thing about being a university teacher is that you’re fairly tolerant about young people saying things they shouldn’t have said. Mary Beard
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
I was not much good as a waitress. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
You always regret upsetting people needlessly. Mary Beard
However judicious academics may be – not like me – they are all taught to see through crap. Mary Beard
Barring some sociopaths, probably, there is nobody who doesn’t care about their appearance. Mary Beard
Playing around with other people’s husbands when you were 17 was bad news. Yes, I was a very naughty girl. Mary Beard
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? Mary Beard
I knew that Trump was ghastly. I knew I’d vote for Hillary if I had a vote. Mary Beard
You can hardly be a classicist and not be interested in theatre. Mary Beard
There is nothing inherently conservative in the ancient world. Mary Beard
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
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. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
I’m an academic. I argue; I engage with people. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
For whatever reason, some sorts of women’s silence were broken by MeToo. This is the optimistic bit. And that will lead to a much more careful attention to women’s voices. Mary Beard
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. Mary Beard
I remember plastering the kitchen with Black Power pictures of Angela Davis. Mary Beard