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What is "self-serving"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
self-serving
adjective
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ a self-serving political maneuver
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A very self-serving philosophy, albeit dubious mathematics.
▪ Curtiss draws a picture of a sensual, self-serving middle-aged woman who wields power as well as influence.
▪ Everybody outside the financially secure, self-serving and blinkered Cabinet.
▪ Hartley wrote the book on self-serving.
▪ Like Pareto, Burnham argued that Marxism was the self-serving ideology of an insurgent working class elite.
▪ Since Schoenberg's day, modernism has has not been averse to self-serving diatribes.
▪ The decentralized authority A strategy of decentralization would appear to answer the critics of monolithic bureaux and self-serving power and resources maximizers.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
self-serving

also self serving, 1827, from self- + serving, present participle adjective from serve (v.).

Wiktionary
self-serving

a. Showing interest only in oneself

WordNet
self-serving

adj. interested only in yourself [syn: self-seeking]

Usage examples of "self-serving".

There was a flat, lifeless quality about it that, without the verve of battlefield blood, spoke of tyranny most repellent and egregious, and yet at the same time petty and self-serving.

I think: that his language is ostentatious, his tone cornball and melodramatic, his selection of facts preposterously self-serving.

Lacking the Alton Gift of forced rapport, which had given his predecessor such an advantage, Herm made do with scraps of unguarded thought, and what he mostly heard was more banal or self-serving than useful.

Unlike Tom and the KDT and the fundamentalists, I have known Christopher Goodman almost all of his life, and he has never once told me a lie or done anything that was in the least bit self-serving.

Regardless of our immersion in self-serving desire, on Shabbat we are given the opportunity to be purified-not through any earned merit of our own, but simply as a gift from the Creator.

No one would miss these bunglers, who are stinking up Tallahassee with their rotten, self-serving politics.

So, which comes first or which is most powerful: the selfish thoughts, the greedy emotions, or the mean, self-serving behavior?

He told of the treachery of individual members, the corruption of conscienceless self-serving cliques, the growing threat to newly won liberties.

How antibiological,, petty, and self-serving were her value judgments.

I want practical, self-serving men, not blindly loyal men who will lose their common sense the first time someone badmouths a Rhomandi.

It was a nasty, vicious, conniving, and wretchedly self-serving creature that tried to get as much gain as it could out of every word.

Which means these cretins will be formulating policy for the Star Kingdom, which means, effectively, for the entire Alliance, unless I publically oppose them and bring on a constitutional crisis which could be even more dangerous than letting this fumble-fingered troop of self-serving, egotistical, power-hungry incompetents run the show!

Setting up a bomb scare was not only cruel and self-serving, it was far from harmless.

Somehow his current church affiliation looked self-serving and insincere, the convenient refuge of a culprit hoping to make himself look good in the eyes of the parole board.

Without corroborating evidence, it could only have been viewed as self-serving propaganda and hurt our credibility.