Cleopatra Quotes

Cleopatra stood at one of the most dangerous intersections in history; that of women and power. Clever women, Euripides had warned hundreds of years earlier, were dangerous. (Stacy Schiff)

As Anthony said to Cleopatra as he opened a crate of ale: "Oh, I say, some girls are bigger than others, Some girls' mothers are bigger than other girls' mothers.

Morrissey

No one in the modern world controls the wealth or territory that Cleopatra did.

Stacy Schiff

Here you have an incredibly ambitious, accomplished woman who comes up against some of the same problems that women in power come up against today. Cleopatra plays an oddly pivotal role in world history as well; in her lifetime, Alexandria is the center of the universe, Rome is still a backwater.

Stacy Schiff

Cleopatra had one great advantage. She lived at a time when female sovereigns were not anomalies. And when women enjoyed rights they would not again enjoy for another 2,000 years. You could call them early feminists, if I may use a dirty word.

Stacy Schiff

Certainly, I am writing as a 21st-century woman, so I am much more inclined to view her as a three-dimensional woman. I think we keep coming up with this stubborn problem of a woman being judged by her appearance rather than her accomplishments. We are much more inclined to ask: was Cleopatra beautiful?

Stacy Schiff

I never really thought about how when I look at the moon it;s the same moon as Shakespeare and Marie Antoinette and George Washington and Cleopatra looked at.

Susan Beth Pfeffer

The studio system collapsed only when Elizabeth Taylor charged $1 million for Cleopatra.

Leslie Caron

THEODOTUS: Caesar: you are a stranger here, and not conversant with our laws. The kings and queens of Egypt may not marry except with their own royal blood. Ptolemy and Cleopatra are born king and consort just as they are born brother and sister. BRITANNUS (shocked): Caesar: this is not proper. THEODOTUS (outraged): How! CAESAR (recovering his self-possession): Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

George Bernard Shaw

Give, you gods, Give to your boy, your Caesar, The rattle of a globe to play withal, This gewgaw world, and put him cheaply off; I'll not be pleased with less than Cleopatra.

John Dryden

But the Quincunx of Heaven runs low, and 'tis time to close the five ports of knowledge. We are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasmes of sleep, which often continueth præcogitations; making Cables of Cobwebbes and Wildernesses of handsome Groves. Beside Hippocrates hath spoke so little and the Oneirocriticall Masters, have left such frigid Interpretations from plants, that there is little encouragement to dream of Paradise it self. Nor will the sweetest delight of Gardens afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dulnesse of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the Bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a Rose. (Thomas Browne)

Caesar was a reserved, disbelieving, obdurate man, and Cleopatra had conquered him by loving him for what others found repellent. ‘In you, Caesar,' she told him, ‘I have something that, being not sweet, will not corrupt-but, like a sour metal, will only tarnish.' And in Cleopatra Caesar had something of another world, something hellish it might be, a stranger-but, because a stranger, one with whom he could yield to weariness of himself and yet feel that in his own world he had lost none of its secrets.

Laura Riding

I really don't remember much about Cleopatra. There were a lot of other things going on.

Elizabeth Taylor

She [Cleopatra] was then a very young girl, but had already begun to look upon the world as a mean, dark place, in which fortune and brightness were to be had only be seizing from others what one could and keeping it in one's hold as long as possible. Believing that there were not enough desirable things for all to have share in them, she made up her mind that the happiest person was the one who was the cleverest thief. She worked with vicious fanaticism to have what she coveted; thinking that none knew so well as herself the joy of possessing and none therefore deserved so much. When she had won her way she softened as a goddess to mortals-pouring out affection and benevolence with an abandon that was unmatchable and frightening, but irresistible. Then she was happy, and felt virtuous.

Laura Riding

Cæsar might have married her [Cleopatra], but he had a wife at home. There's always something.

Will Cuppy

And with Cæsar to take in his hand the army, the empire, and Cleopatra, and say, "All these will I relinquish if you will show me the fountain of the Nile."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The interesting thing about Cleopatra is that she is such a shape-shifter. I mean through history we've all molded her to our times and our places. So there's room for a movie for her, but I don't think it will hew to the book.

Stacy Schiff

We don't know how Cleopatra spent her days, but we do know how other Hellenistic monarchs spent their days. There has been a great amount of scholarship in the last 30 years about education in the Hellenistic world and women in the Hellenistic world. We now know how an upper-class woman was educated in her day.

Stacy Schiff

I checked to see if there'd been a really good book published in the last few decades. Then I started with what Cleopatra would have read, asking myself, "What can we know about her education?” It turns out to be a very great deal, and bizarrely, no one had written about that before.

Stacy Schiff

I mean she's Cleopatra... shouldn't she and Antony have known better? They were so different..." "Variety is the spice of life" "And from a thousand miles apart" "Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Ally Carter

You still don't get it, do you, Margaret?' Kat smiled almost sadly. 'We never had to steal the Antony. All we had to do was get it next to the Cleopatra and switch the signs. (Ally Carter)

I'm very aware that after you've played Cleopatra, there's not a lot that can top that in this sphere, so it means that I want to almost change the sphere I work in rather completely because I will always be comparing it to Cleopatra.

Harriet Walter

The truth is very few of us are related to Napoleon or Cleopatra. Although, those are bad examples as I am actually descended from both of them.

Jim Piddock

She was not a white woman. She was not a Greek... Until the emergence of the doctrine of white superiority, Cleopatra was generally pictured as a distinctly African woman, dark in color.

John Henrik Clarke

There is a certain kind of respect for authenticity today that there wasn't back in the days when they did 'Cleopatra,' where everything looked like a giant motel. People want to have it be authentic in the look, and authentic in the way people behave.

John Milius

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