"No bold gesture can be based on so petty a motive as revenge."

It speaks volumes about that person that they offer a seat for such petty ulterior motives.

Employ your Chaotic Response Suppression techniques rigorously; banish such petty motives from your mind.

Sometimes small minded and petty motives come back to bite you hard in the posterior.

Attempts to evaluate such petty human motives, in an infinite and impersonal cosmos amidst which mankind is a negligible and microscopic accident, are at best rather naive; but we may, if we wish, seek to correlate them with this or that system of relative standards.

These three, actuated probably by petty personal motives, combined to form a majority of the council in harassing opposition to the governor-general's policy; and they even accused him of corruption, mainly on the evidence of Nuncomar.

He told reporters he wanted to make that plain so people would stop ascribing "petty partisan motives" to his actions.

The mandate of this temporary commission would have been perfectly clear and would have appeared devoid of petty political ulterior motives if the oral amendment presented by the rapporteur had not been the subject of genuine obstruction by the socialist MEPs.

And she attributes some petty motive to everything we do or say . . . or DON'T say.

The next day he reaffirmed his pledge, saying he was tired of people's ascribing "petty partisan political motives" to his every action.