About

"No Gods or Kings. Only Man" is a phrase that appears on a banner above the entrance to the underwater city of Rapture from the 2007 video game BioShock. A memorable component of the game due to its prominent placement at its very start, the banner and the slogan have been referenced and appeared in a variety of memes in the 2010s and 2020s.

Origin

On August 21st, 2007, first-person shooter video game Bioshock was released. At the very start of the game, as the player enters the lighthouse that serves as the entrance to the underwater city of Rapture, they are greeted by a statue of its leader Andrew Ryan with a propaganda banner hanging from it (shown below). The banner reads, "No gods or kings. Only Man", reflecting Ryan's secular and libertarian values.

On January 12th, 2014, Know Your Meme^[1] user CornBread archived an Expand Dong edit of the image created by an unknown user. The post (shown below) received over 30 upvotes on the site in eleven years.

Spread

More edits of the image were circulated online in the late 2010s. For example, on November 6th, 2017, Funnyjunk^[2] user cigma posted an edit referencing Doki Doki Literature Club that earned over 90 upvotes on the site in eight years (shown below).

In 2020, a King meme based on the format saw viral spread online with multiple reposts on X,^[3] Reddit and Instagram (shown below). More memes based on the image, notably those contributing to the "all art is political" discourse, were circulated online in the 2020s.

On June 16th, 2025, following the wave of "No Kings" protests against the United States president Donald Trump, entrepreneur and billionaire Elon Musk tweeted the banner, commenting, "Anyone else think of this yesterday?" The post (shown below) garnered over 46.6 million views, 17,000 reposts and 203,000 likes in three days.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References