Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.

The line satirizes a common, unexamined form of patriotism: the belief that one’s nation is inherently superior, grounded less in evidence than in the accident of birthplace. In Shaw’s typically iconoclastic spirit, it treats national pride as a kind of inherited bias—akin to tribalism—rather than a reasoned moral or political commitment. The implication is not necessarily that affection for one’s country is wrong, but that claims of national “bestness” often rest on circular logic (“it’s best because it’s mine”). Read this way, the quote presses for cosmopolitan skepticism and for evaluating countries by principles and outcomes rather than identity.