187 Quotes by Mary Beard

If being a decent soul is being maternal, then fine. I’ll call it human.

They create desolation and call it peace There.

Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?

But the last century of the Republic was more than a mere bloodbath. As the flowering of poetry, theory and art suggests, it was also a period when Romans grappled with the issues that were undermining their political process and came up with some of their greatest inventions, including the radical principle that the state had some responsibility for ensuring that its citizens had enough to eat.

Action without study is fatal...

Child labour was the norm. It is not a problem, or even a category, that most Romans would have understood. The invention of ‘childhood’ and the regulation of what work ‘children’ could do only came fifteen hundred years later and is still a peculiarly Western preoccupation.

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

Just keep mum and “block” them’ you’re told.

It doesn’t much matter what line of argument you take as a woman. If you venture into traditional male territory, the abuse comes anyway. It’s not what you say that prompts it – it’s the fact that you are saying it.