The false alarm was the result of the explosive amplifying effects of a hyper-information society when fed sensitive news.

You must not be alone, for to be alone is to be full of fears and alarms.

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Done Amid fear and suspicion,
with startled minds and frightened eyes,
we pine and scheme over what steps to take
to avoid the certain
danger that threatens us so horribly.
Yet we are wrong. This was not the danger in store;
the portents were false
(or we never heard them, or failed to construe them properly).
It’s some other disaster, precipitous, violent,
one we hadn’t imagined,
that suddenly takes us unawares, and –
there’s no time now – overcomes us.

IT’S A MESS when strange events smack into the windscreen of a resolutely rational mind.

Regulations are all very well for drill, but in the hour of danger they are no more use. You have to learn to think.

At the advent of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal force in the human heart: one very reasonably invites a man to consider the nature of the peril and the means of escaping it; the other, with a still greater show of reason, argues that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger since it is not in man's power to foresee everything and avert the general march of events, and it is better therefore to shut one's eyes to the disagreeable until it actually comes, and to think instead of what is pleasant. When a man is alone he generally listens to the first voice; in the company of his fellow-men, to the second.

So much alarmed that she is quite alarming

Security, alas, can give
A threatening impression;
Too much defense-initiative
Can prompt aggression.

... By disarming, you at once give offense, since you show your subjects that you distrust them, either as doubting their courage, or as doubting their fidelity, each of which imputations begets hatred against you.

confusion is the main cause of worry

When a man comes out of great danger, he is apt to be a little deaf to the call of duty.

I warned especially against phrases, often found in the physical literature, such as ‘disturbing of phenomena by observation’ or ‘creating physical attributes to atomic objects by measurement’. Such phrases are…apt to cause confusion,…

The more you ask certain questions, the more dangerous they become.