Top 90 Stacy Schiff Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We will declare frankly that nothing is clear in this world. Only fools and charlatans know and understand everything. – ANTON CHEKHOV.”

— Stacy Schiff

2. “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

3. “As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.”

— Stacy Schiff

4. “Motherhood is always an act of courage.”

— Stacy Schiff

5. “When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.”

— Stacy Schiff

6. “My next book is on the Salem witch trials. As a small-town Massachusetts girl, this makes me very happy. So does the reunion with documents!”

— Stacy Schiff

7. “And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.”

— Stacy Schiff

8. “Nor was there a Greek word for “incest.” The Ptolemies carried the practice to an extreme. Of the fifteen or so family marriages, at least ten were full brother-sister unions.”

— Stacy Schiff

9. “Yet what difference does it make whether the women rule or the rulers are ruled by women? The result is the same.” – ARISTOTLE.”

— Stacy Schiff

10. “A commanding woman versed in politics, diplomacy, and governance; fluent in nine languages; silver-tongued and charismatic, Cleopatra nonetheless seems the joint creation of Roman propagandists and Hollywood directors.”

— Stacy Schiff

11. “The sky over New England was crow black, pitch-black, Bible black, so black it could be difficult at night to keep to the path, so black that a line of trees might freely migrate to another location or that you might find yourself pursued after nightfall by a rabid black hog, leaving you to crawl home, bloody and disoriented, on all fours.”

— Stacy Schiff

12. “Dioscorides, an expert on medicinal plants, had ample material on which to base a pioneering treatise on bubonic plague.”

— Stacy Schiff

13. “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

14. “Puberty,” it has been said, “is everyone’s first experience of a sentient madness.”

— Stacy Schiff

15. “Women play the villains in fairy tales – what are you saying when you place the very emblem of lowly domestic duty between your legs and ride off, defying the bounds of community and laws of gravity?”

— Stacy Schiff

16. “Things disturb us in the night. Sometimes they are our consciences. Sometimes they are our secrets. Sometimes they are our fears, translated from one idiom to another.”

— Stacy Schiff

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

— Stacy Schiff

18. “When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.”

— Stacy Schiff

19. “The best that can be said of the Alexandrian War is that Caesar acquitted himself brilliantly in a situation in which he stupidly found himself.”

— Stacy Schiff

20. “A woman who is generous with her money is to be praised; not so, if she is generous with her person.” – QUINTILIAN.”

— Stacy Schiff

21. “Blind passion was one thing, all-knowing intimacy a rarer commodity.”

— Stacy Schiff

22. “We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don’t know yet which ones they are. We too have been known to prefer plot to truth; to deny the evidence before us in favor of the ideas behind us; to do insane things in the name of reason; to take that satisfying step from the righteous to the self-righteous; to drown our private guilts in a public well; to indulge in a little delusion.”

— Stacy Schiff

23. “You could not really bargain away your soul before it was established that you had one.”

— Stacy Schiff

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

— Stacy Schiff

25. “No one sits on the stoop when she’s a kid and thinks, ‘I want to be a biographer when I grow up,’”

— Stacy Schiff

26. “IN 1692 THE Massachusetts Bay Colony executed fourteen women, five men, and two dogs for witchcraft.”

— Stacy Schiff

27. “The Ptolemaic system has been compared to that of Soviet Russia; it stands among the most closely controlled economies in history.”

— Stacy Schiff

28. “Salem is in part a story of what happens when a set of unanswerable questions meets a set of unquestioned answers.”

— Stacy Schiff

29. “It is a dangerous thing to have the same men in both the prophecy and the history business.”

— Stacy Schiff

30. “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.”

— Stacy Schiff

31. “Power has for so long been a male construct that it distorted the shape of the first women who tried it on, only to find themselves in a sort of straitjacket.”

— Stacy Schiff

32. “Without mystery, there was no faith.”

— Stacy Schiff

33. “History existed to be retold, with more panache but not necessarily greater accuracy.”

— Stacy Schiff

34. “Cleopatra descended from a long line of murderers and faithfully upheld the family tradition but was, for her time and place, remarkably well behaved.”

— Stacy Schiff

35. “And if you take away my life,” she threatened, “God will give you blood to drink.”

— Stacy Schiff

36. “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?”

— Stacy Schiff

37. “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.”

— Stacy Schiff

38. “Women enjoyed rights in Egypt they would not again enjoy for more than 2,000 years. They owned ships, ran vineyards, filed lawsuits, practiced medicine. Their husbands supported them after divorce. Their power was unprecedented.”

— Stacy Schiff

39. “It was in Alexandria that the circumference of the earth was first measured, the sun fixed at the center of the solar system, the workings of the brain and the pulse illuminated, the foundations of anatomy and physiology established, the definitive editions of Homer produced. It was in Alexandria that Euclid had codified geometry.”

— Stacy Schiff

40. “How much more attention people pay to their fears than to their memories!”

— Stacy Schiff

41. “What was said of an earlier tribune was more true of Antony: “He was a spendthrift of money and chastity – his own and other people’s.” The brilliant cavalry officer had all of Caesar’s charm and none of his self-control. In 44 the conspirators had deemed him too inconsistent to be dangerous. After the Ides Mark Antony was in his glory, entirely the man of the hour – at least until Octavian arrived. Cleopatra.”

— Stacy Schiff

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

— Stacy Schiff

43. “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.”

— Stacy Schiff

44. “Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens.”

— Stacy Schiff

45. “Like any oppressed people, they defined themselves by what offended them, which.”

— Stacy Schiff

46. “Learning was a serious business, involving endless drills, infinite rules, long hours. There was no such thing as a weekend; one studied on all save for festival days, which came with merciful regularity in Alexandria.”

— Stacy Schiff

47. “So it was that when a fiery wisp of a girl presented herself before an adroit, much older man of the world, credit for the seduction fell to her.”

— Stacy Schiff

48. “Romans marveled that in Egypt female children were not left to die; a Roman was obligated to raise only his first-born daughter.”

— Stacy Schiff

49. “It was rare to find a member of the family who did not liquidate a relative or two, Cleopatra VII included.”

— Stacy Schiff

50. “What good were these experiments?” went the skeptic’s question. To which Franklin replied, “What good is a new-born babe?” In some versions he continued: “He may be an imbecile, or a man of great intelligence. Let us wait for him to complete his studies before judging him.”

— Stacy Schiff