Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw slices through monarchy with the cool precision of a stage surgeon: kingship isn’t destiny, it’s production. “Not born” rejects the sentimental myth of bloodline as fate; “made” points to labor, machinery, rehearsal. Then he lands the real insult: “artificial hallucination.” He’s not merely calling royals fake. He’s describing a collective delusion engineered to feel natural, a kind of mass-stagecraft where costumes, ceremonies, architecture, and etiquette do the work of hypnosis. The crown is a prop, but the audience supplies the belief.

As a dramatist and a Fabian-era contrarian, Shaw understood how authority depends on narrative and performance. His plays were built to expose respectable society’s hidden scripts; here he applies the same logic to the most “respectable” institution of all. The line implies complicity: hallucinations require participants. Subjects don’t just endure monarchy; they help manufacture it, repeating the cues that turn an ordinary person into a symbolic vessel. The word “artificial” also needles the Victorian habit of treating hierarchy as organic, like nature’s own design, rather than a political arrangement maintained by incentives and intimidation.

The deeper sting is that Shaw isn’t arguing kings are uniquely fraudulent; he’s warning that legitimacy itself can be an aesthetic effect. When power is theatrical, critique has to be theatrical too: interrupt the ritual, change the script, make the audience notice the wires.