How to Use self-serving in a Sentence

self-serving

adjective
  • His whole agenda was self-serving.
    Thr Staff, HollywoodReporter, 25 Sep. 2025
  • Yet, some are sticking with this self-serving loser.
    Voice Of The People, New York Daily News, 3 Apr. 2026
  • For your own self-serving purposes.
    Alexandra Hutzler, ABC News, 18 Nov. 2025
  • Welcome to Amerizuela, where the leader is self-serving and out for his own gains.
    Voice Of The People, New York Daily News, 15 Jan. 2026
  • And then there’s the self-serving Ghoul, who dispatches with anyone who gets in his way.
    Shirley Li, The Atlantic, 5 Feb. 2026
  • This, in fact, is how Palantir prices its offerings (so there’s the self-serving bit).
    Jeremy Kahn, Fortune, 7 July 2026
  • The sentence is remarkably self-serving, even for Meta.
    Sarah Jeong, The Verge, 1 Mar. 2026
  • Lee ignores them, and his self-serving need to fix things and soothe his own sense of injustice leads to sloppiness.
    Kathryn Vanarendonk, Vulture, 10 Nov. 2025
  • The vigilantes who hanged her were self-serving cattlemen.
    Sandra Dallas, Denver Post, 28 Mar. 2026
  • Yet Aster casts their motives as unprincipled and self-serving.
    Richard Brody, New Yorker, 5 Sep. 2025
  • But this remains a polling no-brainer for lawmakers, who are tired of being seen as self-serving greed monsters.
    Philip Elliott, Time, 9 Mar. 2026
  • Mike wants a partnership with Hobbs that is clearly self-serving, to protect his brother.
    Demetrius Patterson, HollywoodReporter, 27 Oct. 2025
  • And ideally, the goals aren’t self-serving—but considerate of the people around them.
    Valerie Trapp, The Atlantic, 30 Dec. 2025
  • The first proposition is plausible; the second is arguably self-serving.
    Harry Booth, Time, 17 July 2026
  • Evolutionarily speaking, people might not even be built to set self-serving goals.
    Valerie Trapp, The Atlantic, 30 Dec. 2025
  • So, what happens when self-serving narratives collide with a deep (and recent) history?
    Dieter Kurtenbach, Mercury News, 15 Jan. 2026
  • And yet his insistence that his campaign wasn’t really about him, however self-serving, contains more than a seed of truth.
    Jon Allsop, New Yorker, 7 July 2026
  • While a dog can be bribed with a squeaky toy and a pig would surely look at the camera when enticed with a sausage on a stick, cats are known for their admirably self-serving demeanors.
    Desiree Anello, PEOPLE, 29 Oct. 2025
  • Two at-odds facts can both be true, and all of us are susceptible to arrogance and self-serving rationalization.
    Carol Quillen, Time, 21 Feb. 2026
  • More often than not, Odysseus’s deceit is manipulative and self-serving.
    Natasha O'Neill, Vanity Fair, 16 July 2026
  • And much of what Karp said was either self-serving, inaccurate, or contradictory—or all three.
    Jeremy Kahn, Fortune, 7 July 2026
  • On her deathbed, Mary exhorts her son to take advantage of this situation in grotesquely self-serving terms at odds with the movie’s overall soak-the-rich ethos.
    Peter Tonguette, The Washington Examiner, 27 Feb. 2026
  • Elmosnino is an amusing villain, making his most self-serving machinations sound reasonable.
    Television Critic, Los Angeles Times, 30 June 2026
  • Trump’s frustration with Canada has set the tone, and self-serving special interests have magnified his clarion call.
    Rachel Marsden, Hartford Courant, 5 Feb. 2026
  • Fair enough, but Roxie’s self-serving warning turns out to be prescient when Wes comes home to find Estelle ready to break up with him, bags packed and everything.
    Andy Andersen, Vulture, 18 Sep. 2025
  • Readers get to see Boone’s past and present, his brittle family relationships, and all of his self-serving internal narratives.
    Emma Sarappo, The Atlantic, 30 Jan. 2026
  • Anybody so certain of anything — except maybe that the markets will be open for trading tomorrow — is acting out of their own self-serving interests to drive fear and gain more attention.
    Todd Gordon, CNBC, 10 Mar. 2026
  • This is incredibly misleading, dishonest and self-serving.
    U T Readers, San Diego Union-Tribune, 25 Feb. 2026
  • But the film is also a surprisingly thoughtful examination of faith and the ease with which genuine, if maybe misguided, belief can be manipulated and used as a self-serving tool.
    Bill Goodykoontz, AZCentral.com, 9 Dec. 2025
  • The two worst organizations in America are the self-serving politicians on both sides and the money-seeking, self-serving right-wing religious conservatives.
    Voice Of The People, New York Daily News, 11 Jan. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'self-serving.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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