Leadership Quote by John Amery

A soothing sentence that lands like a propaganda leaflet: the world is big enough for both of us, so stop fighting. Coming from John Amery, it reads less like pacifism than a sales pitch for surrender dressed up as reasonableness. The phrasing is deliberately domestic and spatial, not moral or legal. “Room” dodges questions of aggression, borders, and ideology; it turns empire and conquest into a problem of crowding. If there’s “enough,” then conflict becomes irrational, even petty, and the party urging accommodation can pose as the grown-up in the room.

That’s the intent: to recast a total war as a misunderstanding between two great powers with compatible destinies. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, that rhetorical move was common among pro-appeasement voices and fascist sympathizers: frame Hitler’s ambitions as a negotiable demand for “space,” not an expansionist program. The subtext is pointedly British. It invites Britain to imagine itself not as Germany’s target but as its natural peer, even its partner, if it simply steps aside and accepts a new continental order.

Amery’s own context sharpens the cynicism. As a British fascist collaborator later convicted of treason and executed, he wasn’t pleading for mutual coexistence; he was working to soften British resistance and legitimize a German-led Europe. The line’s elegance is its moral laundering: it offers “room” instead of reckoning, coexistence instead of accountability, and asks the listener to mistake capitulation for pragmatism.