Parenting & Family Quote by David Icke

Humiliation is the origin story, and David Icke tells it like a before-and-after photo: the child terrified of public ridicule becomes the adult who briefly enjoys the narcotic of public respect. The line break between “coming true” and “As a television presenter” does a lot of work. It frames ridicule not as a passing embarrassment but as a fate, then contrasts it with a version of life where strangers “shake your hand” and confer status on cue. Respect here isn’t intimacy; it’s a transaction, a social script performed in the street.

The intent feels less like confession for its own sake and more like credentialing. Icke positions himself as someone who has tasted mainstream legitimacy and knows what it costs to lose it. That matters given his later notoriety: the subtext is, I’m not ignorant of how the respectable world works - I lived inside it. When he says “I’d been respected,” the past tense carries a bruise. Respect is depicted as conditional, temporary, dependent on remaining within the approved persona. Step outside, and the child’s fear returns, now amplified by mass media.

Coming from an athlete-turned-presenter, it’s also a commentary on performance culture: you’re trained to manage public judgment, yet still ruled by it. The quote quietly suggests a motive force behind reinvention and contrarianism: if the crowd can turn on you anyway, there’s a perverse freedom in choosing the role that invites ridicule and then converting that ridicule into identity, even into power.