How to Use self-serving in a Sentence

self-serving

adjective
  • His whole agenda was self-serving.
    — Thr Staff, HollywoodReporter, 25 Sep. 2025
  • Doe's lawyer has in turn said those arguments are self-serving.
    — ABC News, 8 Oct. 2026
  • 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
  • Cox’s critics will no doubt find this narrative self-serving, perhaps even grandiose.
    — Mckay Coppins, The Atlantic, 27 Aug. 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
  • Dozens of people have accused Combs of playing games with their lives, sometimes for self-serving business reasons, other times for his own amusement.
    — Nancy Dillon, Rolling Stone, 21 Sep. 2026
  • Their Democratic rivals are hitting back, saying the efforts have either not gone far enough or are self-serving in the final weeks of the campaign.
    — David Hickey, NBC news, 15 Oct. 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
  • Whether the Polish robotics wiz is following in the self-serving footsteps of Sam Altman remains to be seen.
    — Joe Wilkins, Futurism, 9 Sep. 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

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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