Gorse is a base, selfish creature who preys on the greedy and foolish, manipulating their foibles and ambition to part them from money they can ill afford to lose.
While other girls of her class were brought up to bring Father his paper, and then to disappear into silence, Smith was a "wicked, selfish creature" who mostly got to please herself, her eccentricity and determination (useful qualities in a poet) growing exponentially as a result.
The modern-day "Famous Ones" are nasty, selfish creatures who live in opulent apartments.
Another set of studies, conducted by Harvard and Yale academics in 2012, uncovered results suggesting we are not by our nature selfish creatures.
They say that cats need lots of human attention, and are not the solitary, selfish creatures they're often thought to be: less Mr. Bigglesworth and more Bustopher Jones, the cat about town.
For the last 50 years, many evolutionary biologists have told us that we are little different from other primates — we're selfish creatures, able to act altruistically only when it will benefit our kin or our future selves.
Such moments — along with the repeated tensions over sex, property, and labor, which rent nearly all these places — are reminders that their inhabitants, for all their efforts at transcendence, stubbornly remain status-seeking, gene-propagating, and, quite simply, selfish creatures.
Hume's empirically-based thesis that we are fundamentally loving, parochial, and also selfish creatures underlies his political philosophy.
That's who you really are: a poisonous garbage heap full of selfish creatures whose memes are not funny.
It is why all spirituality attempts to connect us to each other, to see the face of the godhead in the face of the stranger, and to become better than the isolated, selfish creatures we are.
People, being inherently selfish creatures, would invariably make some excuse as to why they couldn't give us any of their hard-earned money, and objection handling was the way we were taught to deal with these excuses.
