Politics & Power Quote by Michael Palin

Palin swings the knife with a smile: the world gets pitched “safety” the way a marketer pitches “freshness,” as a comforting label slapped onto something that might actually be rotting. The target isn’t security itself but the story powerful people tell about it. Politicians and religious leaders, in his framing, are twin manufacturers of moral panic: one sells threats to justify borders, surveillance, and hard lines; the other can sanctify division as destiny, turning “us vs. them” into a spiritual duty.

The line works because it reframes barriers as emotional theater rather than practical protection. “Contrary to what…would like us to believe” implies an audience being managed, not informed. Palin is calling out the soft authoritarian move: present separation as common sense, then make dissent look naive. The subtext is that fear is politically productive. It’s easier to govern a public that’s been taught to flinch.

Coming from a comedian matters. Palin’s public persona is built on curiosity and humane observation, amplified by his travel work: a career spent crossing borders, meeting strangers, and showing how quickly “otherness” dissolves in conversation. So the sentence isn’t airy globalism; it’s a rebuttal grounded in lived encounters and, likely, in the post-9/11 and Brexit-era reflex to treat walls as policy and suspicion as patriotism.

He’s also smuggling in a more uncomfortable claim: safety is relational. You don’t get it by shrinking your world. You get it by expanding the circle of people you can recognize as human.