Daily Inspiration Quote by Cyril Falls

“Ready acceptance” is doing the real work here. Falls isn’t romanticizing leadership as charisma or moral glow; he’s framing it as a kind of social engineering under pressure: the deliberate management of people’s reflexive suspicion toward change. The phrase assumes that the default setting of institutions, armies, and publics is inertia. Tradition isn’t neutral; it’s a self-protecting system that treats novelty as a threat until someone with authority makes it feel inevitable, safe, even honorable.

Falls wrote as a military historian in a century that repeatedly proved how quickly the “unfamiliar” arrives anyway - new weapons, new doctrines, new alliances, new political realities. In that context, leadership becomes less about inventing the new than about translating it into the old language people already trust: duty, continuity, competence. He’s also quietly warning that change without leadership doesn’t stay noble or rational; it becomes chaos, rumor, faction. The leader’s job is to prevent the unfamiliar from being rejected as heresy or, worse, embraced in a panic without discipline.

There’s an interesting ambivalence in his construction. “Ensure acceptance” suggests persuasion, but also control. Falls is realistic enough to imply that tradition must sometimes be overridden, not gently negotiated with. Read in the shadow of two world wars, the line carries a sober thesis: modernity will demand adaptations that feel wrong to people trained by habit. Leadership is the mechanism that makes necessary discontinuity survivable - and that is both its civic virtue and its potential danger.