151 Quotes by Stacy Schiff

Faith aside, witchcraft served an eminently useful purpose. The aggravating, the confounding, the humiliating all dissolved in its cauldron. It made sense of the unfortunate and the eerie, the sick child and the rancid butter along with the killer cat. What else, shrugged one husband, could have caused the black and blue marks on his wife’s arm?

Her palace shimered with onyx, garnet, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue.

For talk is evil: It is light to raise up quite easily, but it is difficult to bear, and hard to put down. No talk is ever entirely gotten rid of, once many people talk it up: It too is some god.” – HESIOD.

We have ample testimony to her sense of humor; Cleopatra was a wit and a prankster. There is no cause to question how she read Herodotus’s further assertion that Egypt was a country in which “the women urinate standing up, the men sitting down.

The witch hunt stands as a cobwebbed, crowd-sourced cautionary tale, a reminder that – as a minister at odds with the crisis noted – extreme right can blunder into extreme wrong.

History is written not only by posterity, but for posterity as well.

While Egyptian speakers learned Greek, it was rare that anyone ventured in the opposite direction. To the punishing study of Egyptian, however, Cleopatra applied herself. She was allegedly the first and only Ptolemy to bother to learn the language of the 7 million people over whom she ruled.

There are people whose defects become them, and others who are ill served by their good qualities. – La Rochefoucauld.

One loyal friend,” Euripides reminds us, “is worth ten thousand relatives.