Jonathan Bowden in “Quotes”

Arrows into the Future

May 31, 2026

Jonathan Bowden (1962-2012) was an artist, writer, and orator known for his speeches at right-wing cultural groups such as the New Right and the London Forum, he also gave many speeches for the British National Party in his role as Cultural Officer. Bowden argued that political action must be fused with cultural knowledge if Britain is to be revived.

He was a Nietzschean and advanced a forward thinking conception of culture that stepped over the reactionary preoccupations that had long mired the right in battles that were either unwinnable or already lost. Following his death, his reputation continued to grow through the widespread circulation of his speeches on the internet. Recognising the potential of the medium, he often seemed to speak not only to the handful of men gathered in a dingy pub room before him, but also to future generations who would encounter his ideas online.

Although he produced a substantial body of work, including books, paintings, and several films, he is best appreciated through his speeches. Among the most notable are: Credo: A Nietzschean Testament, Vanguardism - Hope for the Future, and The Real Meaning of Punch and Judy. He is extremely quotable and many of his concepts and turns of phrase have entered the vocabulary of the internet right.

The quotations collected here are drawn from his speeches and essays and represent some of his sharpest, most provocative, and memorable observations and exhortations. Many more could have been included. While some of his work remains unavailable online, and I hope this will encourage others to share his unreleased works, there is a wealth of content available for you to read, watch, and listen to.

Hear the voice of a bohemian intellectual, an outsider artist, a man who spoke to the future with conviction, vision, and fire.

I give you Jonathan Bowden, in quotes.

Thank you very much!

“All of our great thinkers are shooting arrows into the future.”1

“Truthfully, in this age those with intellect have no courage and those with some modicum of physical courage have no intellect. If things are to alter during the next fifty years then we must re-embrace Byron’s ideal: the cultured thug.”2

“I personally think it’s a moral revolution, not anything political, that will save the West, because all the technology is here, all the systems of power are here. You only have to change what’s in people’s minds. It’s very difficult though.”3

“No people can survive if it incorporates as a mental substructure an anti-heroic myth about itself.”4

“Just because most of the politics of this era seems to running well and truly against us does not mean that the situation is hopeless, because situations are never hopeless.”5

“Inequality is what right-wing ideas really mean. Right-wing ideas aren’t just a bit of flag-waving and baiting a few Muslims. Right-wing ideas are spiritually about inequality. The left loves equality. It believes we’re all the same. We must be treated the same. And they believe that as a morality. As a moral good which will be imposed.”6

“Inequality is the truth. Because nature is unjust, but also fair in its injustice. Because there’s always a balance. People who are very gifted in one area will have grotesque weaknesses in another. People who are strong in one area will be weak in another. People who are at the bottom within a hierarchy have a role and have a place in a naturally ordered society. And will be looked after, because patriotism really is the only socialism. That’s why the right appeals to all parties. And to all groups within a culture. Because all have a place.”7

“The danger of the ideology of the victim, which I don’t really subscribe to except as a tactic on occasion, is that you begin to think like a victim, and you begin to act like a victim.”8

“Most people, particularly teenage boys, have a sort of yearning for vanguardism when they’re early in life, and then they forget it as they get older, and it becomes smeared and smudged over by various forms of liberal orthodoxy.”9

“There is a degree to which we have to understand that in our politics all is open, and anything can happen, and the future is ours if we want it to be and that the point of the elitist view that I’m putting forward is that the absence of despair is always necessary for our way of thinking and our way of looking at things. I ask you not to despair. I ask you to look to the future and to the present and to the past. I ask you to remain in faith with vanguardistic and elitist views.”10

“One man alone in a room with a computer, a typewriter as it was, can change the world. A few people alone in a room, if they cleave to an idea whose time has come, can still change the world.”11

“I think that the worst thing that can be uttered at this time is despair, because there are more than enough of us to provide the vanguard which is necessary. The trick is to link the vanguard to the popular will and to find a way to link the vanguard to the popular will.”12

“What you have to do in my opinion is reconnect with that which is primal and that which is glorious. Everyone has it. People basically manifest it at different levels of intellectual complexity, but everyone has primordial emotions.”13

“Hierarchical elitism is so important, because if there is nothing above you, then there’s nothing to look forward to, there’s nothing to transcend to, there’s nothing to abide by that is beyond and outside one’s often quite trivial concerns.”14

“When people cease to believe in anything higher and above themselves they render themselves open to the prospect of slaughter in my opinion. Therefore, it’s very important if there are prior artists in the tradition to go back to the prospect of the existence of identity even in attenuated forms.”15

“Once a people loses its ability to recognise its own side, its own semiotic of being, it’s finished as a people unless things get so bad that there’s a return to forms of identity by looking at the very small vanguard of people who haven’t given up on them.”16

“All art begins with a folk. It begins with a people, and you go up from that, depending upon the intellectual level that you want to ascend to and lead in accordance with your aptitude, your mind, your circumstances, and your desire to be ennobled.”17

“In terms of the right, you can have a very low view of the right, or a sort of low version of right-wing ideas, or you can have a very high version of right-wing ideas. If you have the very high version, you end up almost speaking to yourself. If you have the very low version, you face complete demonisation by the forces of media power which exists completely against you. I personally think that, in this moment of maximum difficulty for our way of looking at things, it’s important to pitch the level as high as possible, partly in relation to the baton that you’re going to hand on.”18

“I am not arguing for a surrogate religiosity of culture, but I think that something which mildly approaches it is necessary. If people give up on the highest things that their people as individuals have created they are opening the space for themselves to be destroyed in the future by people who will not give up on their greatest gifts.”19

“Self-pride is very emblematic of an ethnic sense of purpose and also a joie-de-vivre in relation to this life. If you strip that out and take it away from people, they lose something, they lose spirit. They become morbid and depressed. Everyone needs great cultural icons, whether they’re interested in them or not. They are part of the fabric that gives an individual life some sort of meaning.”20

“The reason that I talk about Eliot, talk about Pound … is to keep alive these figures of power. These are figures of cultural power who should not be lost sight of. They are not just an area of hedonist decadence and celebration of everything falling to pieces. They can be an area of restoration and renewal both individually and collectively. People need the heroic in their own life, and considerable artistic achievements border on the heroic at times. Other people can feed off that and feed the nature of their identity.”21

“The point of high culture is to give ideas to our people even if they don’t subscribe to it. The point is always to live outside one’s own cultural comfort zone. The point is always to try to strive for that which is higher and that which is above. I partly preach artistic concerns and considerations of what I believe to be a higher type because I think they are a way to go for people who are totally blocked in relation to expression of their own identity. Lots of people today yearn for a clean and a new way in which to express their own identity.”22

“We need to revive as a people. We need to show some vigour and some strength again! We need to show some will again! We need to show some patriotism again! As our people huddle before the conformity of the television, some of them secretly think these thoughts. It’s time no longer to be secret about them. It’s time no longer to be sort of locked in rooms with mildly ‘incorrect’ thoughts. People have to ventilate those thoughts!”23

“We must make sure that essentially the only form of social concern that is left is patriotism, because it ties people together in their difference within a coherent group and in their inequality. It ties them together. It is the only social glue that is left. It is the only trump that allows individual freedom but allows group identity, allows both.”24

“Art is the creation in objective form of the spiritual nature of a people.”25

“For my purposes art is the delineation of meaning and form, art is radically non-conceptual in its objectivism, art is about representation and about objective reality albeit drawn in fantasy from the mind.”26

“The purpose of doing modernism from the right rather than the left is to insist that the world can be made again, is to insist on a new version of foreseeing and is to insist on elitism in intelligence, in knowledge, in perception, and in the results of what’s betrayed and seen.”27

“We have lost our dynamism as a people: mentally and in every other way. Our people are still quite strong when it comes to the fist, and a bit of pushing and shoving. But what’s up here, is lacking. A thug is not a soldier, and a soldier is not a warrior. And it’s the strength which exists up here which is the thing that we have to cultivate. I believe that strength comes from belief, in things which are philosophically grounded and appear real to you.”28

“There’s a concept in my philosophy which is called self-overbecoming. Where you take things which exist at a lower level, that you feel uncomfortable with, and you sublimate them, you throw them forward, you ventilate them. You take that which you don’t like, and you transmute it alchemically, psychologically, and intellectually, and you change it.”29

“If we can’t overcome the weapons which are used against us, we will disappear. These are the facts. And therefore we have to do so in our own minds.”30

“So my view is that we must return again to certain sets of ideas which suit us, that are cardinal for us, that are metaphysically objective and subjective, that see the flux and warp and weft of life, and its complicatedness, but know there are absolute standards upon which things are based.”31

“I am a modernist in many ways because I believe we created a modern world that has been taken away from what it could have been. The modern and that which preceded it are not necessarily in complete opposition.”32

“Stoicism should be our way. Courage should be our way. When somebody pushes you, you push them back. When somebody’s false to you, you’re false to them. When somebody’s friendly to you, you are to them. You fight for your own country, and your own group, and your own culture, and your own civilisation, at your own level, and in your own way. And when somebody says, ‘Apologise for this, or that’ you say: ‘No. I regret nothing.’”33

“One’s life is a bullet that goes through screens. You hit your final screen, and you’re dead. What happens after, none of us know. There’s either a spiritual world, as all the cardinal and metaphysically objectivist religions of every type for every culture and every group say there is, or there’s not. In my philosophy, the energy that’s in us goes out into everything which exists. That there is an end after the end, but it’s not finite or conscious. That’s what I think.”34

“I urge all white people in this era to look into the mirror and to ask themselves, “What do you know about what you are?” And if you don’t know enough, put your hand on that mirror, and move towards greater knowledge of what you can become. We’re all going to die. Make use of that time which remains.”35

“Liberalism also feeds on indifference. Indifference to the future and indifference to the generations that are coming in the future.”36

“Liberal society is cancerous, ultimately, of real culture because it divides the interconnectedness between the high and the low and prevents the energy coming up from beneath, from the bottom to the top. A real culture has everyone involved in the culture.”37

“Liberalism is moral syphilis and I’m stepping over it.”38

“It can be turned around. It can be changed. The whole system fears that this could occur. We must make sure that it does occur here in Wales and in Britain. This country is not over. We are still alive. There is still plenty to do.”39

“Speeches are about energy, and are about power, and about how you utilise power and how you channel it.”40

“I believe in a mixture of the past and the present. I’m an optimistic person, actually. I believe very much in the future. I don’t share the pessimism that most right-wing people do. Most right-wingers are pessimistic people and have a strong streak of Puritanism in their personalities. Although there are Puritanical sides to me, they tend to be part of a starkness and part of an aesthetic that is thrown beyond itself. ”41

“To me, artistic things are so much more important than anything else, and politics is a way to achieve certain artistic goals that otherwise would fall fallow.”42

“To have a future, people need to be aware of their past, and they need to be aware of the glory of that past.”43

“Political correctness is a methodology and a grammar. It is designed to restrict the prospect of a thought before the thought is even enunciated.”44

“People will be attracted in the future not by reason. They will read up with their reason once they have decided to emotionally commit. The important thing is to get people emotionally. And it’s to appeal to the forces and wellsprings in their mind which are eternal, and which underpin rationality. The power of irrational belief as spiritual codification, of mystical belief, of belief in identity, of the need for communitarianism, and the need to belong, is immensely powerful. Far more powerful than the anything the Left can offer.”45

“In politics you don’t speak to people’s minds. You speak to them physiologically. You speak to what’s underneath the mind. Do you think you can raise men up into battle just by talking to what’s mentally up here? You influence the brains of the men who will influence them. Your discourse will influence them by doing that, but you don’t influence them by doing that.”46

“I believe in the future. I’m a progressive, you see, in a strange sort of way. I just want to progress somewhere else. Nietzsche’s a progressive who wants to go on with inequality. The modern world’s happened. We’re in it.”47

“I’m a very conservative person, but I’m also a revolutionary. You need the two combined, you see. That’s why I call myself a revolutionary conservative, which most people think, “What is he talking about?” But it’s true. That’s what I am really.”48

“The right will only defeat the left and the centre if it’s more creative, more energetic, more radical, more intelligent, more sassy, cooler. That’s the only way we’ll win. The trouble with right-wing people, on the whole, is they’re sort of pessimistic, slightly unimaginative. They’re deeply conservative people. They’re very decent people, but they’re conservative. You’ve got to be more radical than that.”49

“The ’60s revolution is a cultural revolution, not really an economic one, but a cultural and social revolution and it needs to be reversed or changed. The energy can be taken and changed and moved in a new direction, you see? Everything’s about energy. Master it, control it, and you can control the world.”50

“Life’s totally open. Anything can change. A man could have an idea, not with a typewriter anymore now, but with a computer on his own in a room alone, a laptop and the world can change. Everything is possible. Our group believes that it’s all open. Everything is still possible. We’re here. We’ve had some nice wine and crisps. It’s not always totally as bad as everyone thinks. The changes that need to happen are moral and mental and spiritual. If they happen, enormous changes can occur.”51

“Greatness is in the mind and in the fist. The glory of our type is not behind us. We can be great again. But the first thing that we have to do is to say, ‘I walk towards the tunnel, and I’m on my own, and I’m not afraid. And I have no regrets.’”52

Thomas Carlyle - The Sage of Chelsea https://jonathanbowden.org/speeches/thomas-carlyle/

Why I Write https://jonathanbowden.org/articles_reviews/why-i-write/

Q & A Why Bowden Was Not a Conservative (Black Gnosis Interview) https://jonathanbowden.org/speeches/q-a-on-renewing-the-radical-right-why-bowden-was-not-a-conservative-and-other-topics/

Credo: A Nietzschean Testament https://jonathanbowden.org/speeches/credo-a-nietzschean-testament/

Vanguardism - Hope for the Future https://jonathanbowden.org/speeches/vanguardism/

Credo

Ibid

Vanguardism

Ibid

Robinson Jeffers Misanthrope Extraordinaire https://jonathanbowden.org/speeches/robinson-jeffers/

T. S. Eliot: Ultra-Conservative Dandy https://jonathanbowden.org/speeches/t-s-eliot/

Ibid