Like the firm handshake and looking people straight in the eye, the blazer had originally been a symbol of trust. Because of this, it had been purloined by the less-than-trustworthy and became their preferred disguise.

In my career as a writer, I preferred to avoid current events: I wrote young adult novels and book reviews and lifestyle journalism about health and parenting and other such evergreens.

In 2009, UnitedHealth, a leading insurance company, paid $350 million to settle lawsuits brought by the American Medical Association and other physician groups for shortchanging consumers and physicians for medical services outside its preferred network.

I have always preferred to keep things to myself rather than sharing them with anyone, but I am learning that if you let it go, you feel better for it. Don't keep it all bottled up inside; don't take it all on alone.

Constant, gentle pressure is my preferred technique for leadership, guidance, and coaching.

I always preferred my father's pasta the next day, when he'd put it in a hot oven with heaps of extra cheese. It would emerge slightly burned and very crisp on top.

Maybe Elvis was inhibited by inbred religious prohibitions or an Oedipal complex, or maybe he simply preferred the thrill of a denied release. Whatever put the brakes on the famous pelvis, it ground to a halt at a certain point, and that was it.

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.

God, who preferred the correction rather than the death of a sinner, did not desire that a homicide be punished by the exaction of another act of homicide.

I always preferred to hang out with the outcasts, 'cause they were cooler; they had better taste in music, for one thing, I guess because they had more time to develop one with the lack of social interaction they had!

She preferred the quiet solitary atmosphere, to create in her own world of paint and colour, the thrill of anticipating how her works would turn out as she eyed the blank sheets of paper or canvas before starting her next masterpiece. How satisfying it was to mess around in paint gear, without having to worry about spills, starch or frills, that was the life!

Of course, there will always be those who look only at technique, who ask 'how', while others of a more curious nature will ask 'why'. Personally, I have always preferred Inspirational to information.

And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths.

My mom said I was an escapist at heart.... that I preferred imaginary worlds to the real one

I am trying now to be entirely honest. I did actually comfort in the thought that the Devil had, on Strawless Common, defeated God. I much preferred that thought to the thought that God hadn't cared, hadn't helped Robin. I thought all the way back to the story of Eden. God, all-loving, all-wise, had surely wanted people to be happy and healthy and good; it was the Devil who spoiled it all...and since so many people were miserable and sickly and bad the Devil must indeed by very powerful. The lifeless, voiceless thing, lately a singing boy, which they had cut down and put under a sack in the barn to await an unhallowed cross-road grave seemed to me to prove the power of the Devil.

A God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell--mouths mercy, and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!

The Fur Person learned then and there that it is better to be a philosopher than to be a king and that, all things considered, wisdom was to be preferred to power.

It was a lame excuse, and I knew that wasn't the reason he was canceling. If he wanted to avoid me, I would have preferred he made up something about how he and the other guardians had to up Moroi security or practice top-secret ninja moves.

The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they've found it.

I accepted the interviews and encounters that had to be held with the media but I would have preferred to work in peace.

Ninety percent of the students take the 'preferred lender.' Why? Because that's the nature of the relationship. You trust the school. The school is in a position of authority.

I always preferred to hang out with the outcasts 'cause they were cooler they had better taste in music for one thing I guess because they had more time to develop one with the lack of social interaction they had!

Republicans would have preferred the court overturn the health care bill an act that would have underscored Obama's biggest liability - the perception among voters including those who like and trust him that he has been ineffective.

We continue to recognize the greater ability of some to earn more than others. But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him a proper security is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power.