Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
WordNet
n. the quality of being worthy of esteem or respect; "it was beneath his dignity to cheat"; "showed his true dignity when under pressure" [syn: dignity, self-respect, self-esteem]
Usage examples of "self-regard".
She paints so thickly over the stratified residue of yesterday and the day before yesterday and the day before the day before's cosmetics you can hardly make out the wens and blemishes under all the layers of paint, graffiti and old posters -- voluptuous, oppressive, corrupt, self-regarding London marinating in the syrup of her own decay like baba au rhum, while the property speculators burrow away at her guts with the vile diligence of gonococci.
So an appeal to Adams's self-regard, by extolling his integrity to the point of implying that Franklin and Arthur Lee had none, was quite in the Lovell mode.
There were techniques - beyond simple outright destruction, which was always an option - for dealing with this sort of eventuality which normally resulted in the Objects concerned becoming Evangelical Hegemonising Swarm Objects rather than Aggressive Hegemonising Swarm Objects, but if the Objects concerned had been particularly single-minded, it still meant that people had died to contribute to its greedily ungracious self-regard.
In like manner, when a person disables himself, by conduct purely self-regarding, from the performance of some definite duty incumbent on him to the public, he is guilty of a social offence.