Kara Cooney > Quotes

“Male leaders are celebrated for their successes, while their excesses are typically excused as the necessary and expected price of masculine ambition.”
― Kara Cooney, The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt

“Hatshepsut was, as far as we can tell, not a seducer of great generals in charge of legions, for the practical reason that there existed no men greater than she.”
― Kara Cooney, The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt

“In a world where seasons of planting harvests and inundation ruled life and death, it was imperative to bring the gods into daily life to help things along. The more a king invested in festivals of cyclical renewal, the more prosperity the gods bestowed. But if the gods were ignored, bad floods would result, and that meant meager planting and poor harvest, which led in turn to drought, pestilence, disease and death.”
― Kara Cooney, The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt

“Ancient Egypt is an anomaly as the only land that consistently called upon the rule of women to keep its regime in working order, safe from discord, and on the surest possible footing—particularly when a crisis was under way.”
― Kara Cooney, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt

“What is the endgame of all these megaconstructions? Well, in ancient Egypt, the late 6th-dynasty state had not only become so large that it was nonfunctional (think of the giant cable company that never answers the phone), it had also become a mass of intercompeting elites who used the government to serve no one but themselves. (Think of today´s relentless multimillion-dollar bonuses, payoffs, bribes, insider trading, and fraud, all happening openly with no one going to prison.) As the competition ramped up, and as the Egyptian state became impoverished from mismanagement, the end result was nothing less than war.”
― Kara Cooney, The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World

“We need to stop perceiving feminine emotionality as weak and deceitful when it is the most constructive way forward in days of crisis.”
― Kara Cooney, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt

“It should come as no surprise that women need to work doubly hard to prove their right to power. They have to look to their menfolk around them who can support their claim, rather than detract from it--to their fathers and patriarchs, not to their husbands and lovers. They must clarify to a suspicious public that they are not greedy and conniving, power-hungry for their own sakes, but concerned for the success of a broad swath of society. How does one do that except by somehow downplaying their own ambition, or subsuming her power to that of a male associate, or allowing herself to be interrupted in important meetings, or apologizing more than her male counterparts, or appearing more tentative in her decision-making, or not applying for positions and promotions she might think she isn't qualified for? A woman is rarely congratulated for grasping for more, for reaching higher. Women know exactly how their ambition is perceived by the public, and they must veil their power grabs in a warm and cuddly swath of nonaggression and nonthreatening verbiage, dazzling smiles, colored hair, and a calm and steady gaze, maternal even, without holding their head too high, but not too low either. Is it any surprise that today's women don't even apply for political position of authority if they have to walk through a gauntlet of abuse dissecting their appearance, demeanor, age, weight, and sexual past white simultaneously walking a tightrope of unspoken demands for masculinization?”
― Kara Cooney, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt

“...Akhenaton is the king who allows us to see the invention of one-god worship for what it really was: a patriarchal cult leader´s tactic, the modern manifestation of which many of us still deludedly follow. I´m not saying that every practicing monotheist is an authoritarian. I´m saying that monotheism was specifically invented to support authoritarianism.”
― Kara Cooney, The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World

“Examining Senwosret III´s Egypt clarified how hate rhetoric broadcast within a society created political cohesion. Emasculating an enemy through dehumanizing ideas and acts forged a nation.”
― Kara Cooney, The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World

“Egyptians enacted their politics through the rituals of religion,”
― Kara Cooney, The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt

“her final act was to throw herself into a fiery pit so that no man could exact his retribution on her. (One wonders whether the fiery pit could have been any better than whatever torture they might have meted out.)”
― Kara Cooney, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt

“She and everyone else in the palace were afflicted by these maladies. This constant, inescapable physical suffering is the greatest difference between us and the ancients, even making allowance for the vast disparities of society, language, culture and circumstance, and it is certainly a chief obstacle when it comes to our understanding of their motivations. Perhaps if our outlook on life were shortened to twenty-five years, and if we lived in constant discomfort and anxiety over our very survival, we could know them better.”
― Kara Cooney, The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt

“...The authoritarian is usually not some kind of evil genius but rather the bumbling fool, who in an attempt to become the biggest, most wealthy, most successful king of kings, ends up bringing down the entire system.”
― Kara Cooney, The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World

“Perhaps ancient Egyptian women were made of stronger stuff,”
― Kara Cooney, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt

“Merneith, Neferusobek, Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, Tawosret, and Cleopatra”
― Kara Cooney, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt

“Hatshepsut remains an important example of humanity’s ambivalent perception of female authority.”
― Kara Cooney, The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut's Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt

“Sakhmet and Mut, Bastet and Isis”
― Kara Cooney, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt

“a culture so beautiful—with its golden masks and colossal statues, gods with crocodile heads, and hieroglyphs of whimsical complexity”
― Kara Cooney, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt

“2016 U.S. presidential election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.”
― Kara Cooney, When Women Ruled the World: Six Queens of Egypt