
“"At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable," was his mildly cadaverous reply.”
Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853)
The Fable of the General Manager of the Love Affair Who Demanded a Furlough http://books.google.com/books?id=2_ssAAAAYAAJ&q=%22MORAL+If+it+were+not+for+the+presents+an+elopement+would+be+preferable%22&pg=PA218#v=onepage, Forty Modern Fables (1901)
“"At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable," was his mildly cadaverous reply.”
Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853)
“For Beatrice--I would much prefer it if you were alive and well.”
Lemony Snicket
The Wide Window (2000)
Source: 1960s, Economics As A Moral Science, 1969, p. 1
From Peter Engel, "An Interview With Stanislaw Lem": The Missouri Review, Volume VII, Number 2 (1984) http://www.missourireview.org/index.php?genre=Interviews&title=An+Interview+with+Stanislaw+Lem
“Present action, though futile, is preferable to passive acceptance of such a fate as awaits us.”
Source: A Quest for Simbilis (1974), Chapter 6, “The House on the River” (p. 112)
Source: Bartleby the Scrivener
Source: NRC-Handelsblad in 1987; as quoted in: Jan Tinbergen http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Tinbergen.html at MacTutor History of Mathematics, 2009: Quote about one of his teachers at the University of Leiden