10 Great Annie Besant Quotes That Will Inspire You
Annie Besant (1 October 1847 – 20 September 1933) was a
prominent British socialist, theosophist, women’s rights activist, writer and
orator and supporter of Irish and Indian self-rule.
In 1867, Annie at age 20, married Frank Besant, a clergyman, and
they had two children, but Annie’s increasingly anti-religious views led to a
legal separation in 1873. She then became a prominent speaker for the National
Secular Society (NSS) and writer and a close friend of Charles Bradlaugh. In
1877 they were prosecuted for publishing a book by birth control campaigner
Charles Knowlton. The scandal made them famous, and Bradlaugh was elected M.P.
for Northampton in 1880.
She became involved with union actions including the Bloody
Sunday demonstration and the London matchgirls strike of 1888. She was a
leading speaker for the Fabian Society and the Marxist Social Democratic
Federation (SDF). She was elected to the London School Board for Tower Hamlets,
topping the poll even though few women were qualified to vote at that time.
In 1890 Besant met Helena Blavatsky and over the next few years
her interest in theosophy grew while her interest in secular matters waned. She
became a member of the Theosophical Society and a prominent lecturer on the
subject. As part of her theosophy-related work, she travelled to India. In 1898
she helped establish the Central Hindu College and in 1922 she helped establish
the Hyderabad (Sind) National Collegiate Board in Mumbai, India. In 1902, she
established the first overseas Lodge of the International Order of
Co-Freemasonry, Le Droit Humain. Over the next few years she established lodges
in many parts of the British Empire. In 1907 she became president of the
Theosophical Society, whose international headquarters were in Adyar, Madras,
(Chennai).
She also became involved in politics in India, joining the Indian National Congress. When World War I broke out in 1914, she helped launch the Home Rule League to campaign for democracy in India and dominion status within the Empire. This led to her election as president of the India National Congress in late 1917. In the late 1920s, Besant travelled to the United States with her protégé and adopted son Jiddu Krishnamurti, whom she claimed was the new Messiah and incarnation of Buddha. Krishnamurti rejected these claims in 1929.[1] After the war, she continued to campaign for Indian independence and for the causes of theosophy, until her death in 1933.
1. Better remain silent, better not even think, if you are not
prepared to act.
2. Quick condemnation of all that is not ours, of views
with which we disagree, of ideas that do not attract us, is t
he sign of a narrow mind, of an uncultivated intelligence.
Bigotry is always ignorant, and the wise boy, who will become the wise man,
tries to understand and to see the truth in ideas with which he does not agree.
3. What, after all, is the object of education? To train
the body in health, vigor and grace, so that it may express the emotions in
beauty and the mind with accuracy and strength.
4. A people can prosper under a very bad government and
suffer under a very good one, if in the first case the local administration is
effective and in the second it is inefficient.
5. As the heat of the coal differs from the coal itself, so
do memory, perception, judgment, emotion, and will, differ from the brain which
is the instrument of thought.
6. Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational
position; denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.
7. The mental body, like the astral, varies much in
different people; it is composed of coarser or of finer matter, according to
the needs of the more or less unfolded consciousness connected with it. In the
educated it is active and well-defined; in the undeveloped it is cloudy and
inchoate.
8. Socialism is the ideal state, but it can never be
achieved while man is so selfish.
9. Beauty is no dead thing. It is the manifestation of God
in nature. There is not one object in nature untouched by man that is not
beautiful, for God’s manifestation is beauty. It shines through all His works,
and not only in those that may give pleasure to man.
10. There can be no wise politics without thought
beforehand.
