“Do not give way to useless alarm; though it is right to be prepared for the worst, there is no occasion to look on it as certain.”

Source: Belles on Their Toes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aipyRne6dso
Interview in Mexico, 1995

Preface of M. Quetelet
A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties (1842)
Context: I have always comprehended with difficulty... how persons pre-occupied doubtless by ideas, have seen any tendency to materialism in exposition of a series of facts deduced from documents. In giving to my work the title of Physics, I have had no other aim than to collect, in uniform order, the phenomena affecting man, nearly as physical science brings together the phenomena appertaining to the material world. If certain facts present themselves with an alarming regularity, to whom is blame to be ascribed? Ought charges of materialism to be brought against him who points out that regularity?

Source: Fly Away Home

The Analects, Chapter I, Chapter II
Variant: To see what is right, and not to do it, is want of courage or of principle.
Context: To worship to other than one's own ancestral spirits is brown-nosing. If you see what is right and fail to act on it, you lack courage.
Variant To see what is right, and not to do it, is want of courage or of principle.

Hagakure (c. 1716)

The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, pt. 10, ch. 3.
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