Daily quote by Mary Beard (classicist)

• But when the shock had faded, more hard-headed reaction set in. This wasn’t just the feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. That is, of course, what many people openly or privately think. World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price. But there is also the feeling that all the ‘civilised world’ (a phrase which Western leaders seem able to use without a trace of irony) is paying the price for its glib definitions of ‘terrorism’ and its refusal to listen to what the ‘terrorists’ have to say.
  • London Review of Books, 4 October 2001
• Rome was the only place in the ancient world where the state took responsibility for ensuring its citizens had enough to eat. [They knew] how you make a human community work.
• Roman society incorporated those who were mostly excluded in the ancient world, most obviously, women... They didn't have any formal political rights in Rome
  • Greece vs Rome, debate with Boris Johnson (19 November 2015)
• Greek men didn't all look like this. And indeed, this guy, his musculature is actually physically impossible. What these are are images of a kind of perfect version of Greek masculinity.
  • Shock of the Nude (2020), Episode 1
• She's one of a series of wax models that were used in anatomy classes to demonstrate the internal structure of the body... And the instructor would come along and would remove, in a slightly sadistic way, the breasts and the chest, and the belly to reveal what was inside. And interestingly, there's a uterus with a foetus in - showing us very clearly what the 18th century thought women were for.
  • Shock of the Nude (2020), Episode 2
• I went to Cambridge as an undergraduate in the early 1970s and it was [a] white, posh, male enclave. Ten per cent of students were women and there was very little diversity of any sort. I left and the place has been transformed for the better. There weren’t any of those thick white rugger buggers that I used to teach in 1982.
  • Remarks at Cheltenham Literature Festival, October 2025