Synonyms:
opportunism, self-interest, self-seeking, expedience
Meaning: taking advantage of opportunities without regard for the consequences for others
Usage examples
There self-interest did come in.
"I'll tell you, then," he said with heat, "I imagine the mainspring of all our actions is, after all, self-interest.
"Excuse me," Sergey Ivanovitch interposed with a smile, "self-interest did not induce us to work for the emancipation of the serfs, but we did work for it."
For me the district institutions simply mean the liability to pay fourpence halfpenny for every three acres, to drive into the town, sleep with bugs, and listen to all sorts of idiocy and loathsomeness, and self-interest offers me no inducement."
It was not easy to belong to the "Conferences." Members were pledged to offer their lives completely to God and to renounce all self-interest. Nevertheless, they increased rapidly in number, and the Conferences were attended by all the most influential priests in Paris.
This young man with a livid face--a blonde of the type with black eyes, whose immovable glance has an indescribable fascination, sober in speech as in conduct, dressed in black, lean as a consumptive, but nevertheless vigorously framed--visited the family of his former master and the house of his cashier less from affection than from self-interest.