What's the difference between ruthless and selfish?

Ruthless


Definition:

  • (a.) Having no ruth; cruel; pitiless.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) AB InBev has cut costs ruthlessly as it has bought up companies around the world, including Anheuser-Busch, the brewer of US beer Budweiser.
  • (2) As Greece pleads with its eurozone creditors for more time in meeting its fiscal adjustment targets, Dombrovskis is a fierce champion of surgical austerity applied quickly and ruthlessly.
  • (3) Rather than ruthlessly efficient, I have found them sweet and a bit hopeless."
  • (4) This thread ran through his later writings, which focused particularly on questions of the transformation of work and working time, envisaging the possibility that the productivity gains made possible by capitalism could be used to enhance individual and social life, rather than intensifying ruthless economic competition and social division.
  • (5) "Sometimes a handshake is just a handshake, but when the leader of the free world shakes the bloody hand of a ruthless dictator like Raúl Castro , it becomes a propaganda coup for the tyrant," said Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican Congress member in Florida, told the US secretary of state, John Kerry.
  • (6) But Hilton insists critics are wrong to see the group as ruthless youngsters who meet purely to further their own careers.
  • (7) This is how powerful a hold it has over them.” Mossino, who works with refugees and asylum seekers as well as victims of trafficking, says that in the past decade the trade in Nigerian women has become a hugely profitable and ruthless criminal industry, controlled largely by Nigerian gangs that took root in Italy in the 1980s.
  • (8) On 12 September 1980, the head of the military, Kenan Evren, sent tanks rolling through the streets of the Turkish capital and installed a ruthless military government.
  • (9) The "consultation" and "informed consent" the reports insist must take place before the project goes ahead are a sick joke in a region in which dissent is ruthlessly crushed and people are imprisoned and tortured simply for speaking their own language.
  • (10) She is also waiting to hear if she has won a second Olivier award, this time for her role as the ruthless Hollywood agent in The Little Dog Laughed, the play that transferred from Broadway to the West End last year.
  • (11) A boss on some astronomic pay packet may be held back by shame from paying his cleaners too little relative to that, but emotion will not get in the way of ruthlessness if the process all takes place behind the veil of some corporate contract.
  • (12) "What is clear is that they are as ruthless as any Islamist group or terrorists anywhere in the world," said Antony Goldman, a west Africa risk analyst at London-based PM Consulting.
  • (13) The often confusing circumstances that led to their courts martial and the ruthlessness of their punishments only fully came to light with the publication in 1989 of Julian Putkowski and Julian Sykes's history Shot at Dawn .
  • (14) If there was reason to be worried following five successive defeats, their worst run of the century, they showed no sign of panic during a ruthless attacking performance which guarantees they will spend Christmas in the top six.
  • (15) She was ambitious, and Colonel Gaddafi has always promoted ruthless people.
  • (16) Every couple of years, evidence emerges to underline the unparalleled nature of the state onslaught and ruthless rule-breaking to overcome resistance in the mining communities, bought at a cost of £37bn in today's prices .
  • (17) The footage underscores the ruthlessness of fighting in Pakistan's border areas, where the army has also faced allegations of massacres.
  • (18) Philip French championed Boyle's career from the outset, describing his debut feature film, Shallow Grave , as "a good piece of storytelling... Hitchcock would have admired its ruthlessness and cruel humour."
  • (19) In the past decade, European migration was used as a sort of 21st-century incomes policy in Britain as employers ruthlessly exploited migrant labour to hold down wages – which have since been cut in real terms for four years in a row as a result of the crisis.
  • (20) But we can all probably do without Fifa's "fair play in marketing" lectures, which clothe commercial ruthlessness in the language of sporting decency, apparently oblivious to the impression given by wallpapering every stadium with signs that push BP or declare "We proudly accept only Visa".

Selfish


Definition:

  • (a.) Caring supremely or unduly for one's self; regarding one's own comfort, advantage, etc., in disregard, or at the expense, of those of others.
  • (a.) Believing or teaching that the chief motives of human action are derived from love of self.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) A series of hierarchical multiple regressions revealed the effects of Surgency, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, and Intellect on evoking upset in spouses through condescension (e.g., treating spouse as stupid or inferior), possessiveness (demanding too much time and attention), abuse (slapping spouse), unfaithfulness (having sex with others), inconsiderateness (leaving toilet seat up), moodiness (crying a lot), alcohol abuse (drinking too much alcohol), emotional constriction (hiding emotions to act tough), and self-centeredness (acting selfishly).
  • (2) They have been selfish, thinking of what they can achieve with gas.
  • (3) For a while yesterday, Hazel Blears's selfishly-timed resignation with her rude "rock the boat" brooch send shudders of revulsion through some in the party.
  • (4) A second level of concerted evolution occurs within the functional L1 sequences in a pattern that did not meet our expectations for selfish DNA.
  • (5) Not only did it make every grocery-store run a guilt trip; it made me feel selfish for caring more about birds in the present than about people in the future.
  • (6) Back in 1999 Chris Sidoti, then-head of the Australian Human Rights Commission, called the baby boomers “the most selfish generation in history”.
  • (7) It said Clinton's "cheap shots" had a hidden agenda to discredit China's engagement with Africa and "drive a wedge between China and Africa for the US selfish gain."
  • (8) We propose that REP sequences may be a prokaryotic equivalent of 'selfish DNA' and that gene conversion may play a role in the evolution and maintenance of REP sequences.
  • (9) Although angry when talking about the regime, his campaign grew from selfish motives.
  • (10) After The Arbor's success, said Barnard, the women who would become The Selfish Giant's executive producers, Lizzie Francke at the BFI and Katherine Butler from Film4, "were fantastic about saying, 'What do you want to do next?
  • (11) None of them is British, though there is great anticipation about The Selfish Giant, Clio Barnard's second feature, which premieres in the Directors' Fortnight .
  • (12) Further, it is selfish to suggest that Americans should feel some sort of responsibility for their fellow citizens.
  • (13) In an ideal world, such findings might be interpreted as smart women making smart choices, but instead it seems that this research is just adding fuel to the argument that women who don't have children, regardless of the reason, are not just selfish losers but dumb ones as well.
  • (14) Denial is absurdly selfish (and yet the best selfishness is yet to come).
  • (15) Jeremy Clarkson faced further censure on Saturday after describing people who killed themselves by jumping under trains as "selfish".
  • (16) A world filled with broken promises, selfishness and separations.
  • (17) In fact, Wilson's arguments are more fundamental and persuasive than Snow's; works on evolution, like Sociobiology and Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, have been absorbed into western cultural life as neatly as any neo-Darwinist could have predicted.
  • (18) Sometimes the athletes are so selfish they won't give up their own stuff to help others."
  • (19) Her newspaper profiles over the years are peppered with self-deprecating references to her sporting ruthlessness: her constant mentions of her selfishness and egotism; her win-at-all-costs, only-gold-medals-matter mentality; or the time she flung her helmet at her boyfriend in frustration after losing a race.
  • (20) This has been encouraged by the press' standard strike narrative: these selfish bastards are striking, this is bad, and it will affect you in this awful unacceptable way of maybe making you slightly late for work.