Word: smug
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Virtue & Fate. Ben Franklin was not as smug as he sometimes sounds. He was endlessly bent on civic and personal improvement, whether it was founding a library or starting a fire department. The doctrine of human perfectibility to which he subscribed was not yet the easy evolutionary faith of the 19th century but an everlasting challenge to be met with hard work, sound reason and unswerving virtue. In the end, he accepted fate with the engaging humility of his self-written epitaph...
Dick Colman, Nassau's head coach, is bound to agree with Sebo's statement about the danger of being smug in the Ivy League. As a matter of fact, Colman has uttered the same words. Last Saturday afternoon, somewhere in the mud at Palmer Stadium, the Tigers almost lost a football game to last-place, winless (in the League) Brown University...
...best (and in some cases, the only) solution to many modern-day challenges--but this is not the point. That this stock answer and similar slogans are passively accepted by many "moderate liberals"--often without intellectual study of the economic and political implications involved for our society, but in smug and self-satisfied silence--this is the danger. By his willingness to "go along," the "moderate liberal" in name becomes the Respectable Radical in practice...
...Broadway has done everything to destroy the American theatre in the smug knowledge that nothing can destroy it," said Louis Kronenberger, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of English, last Thursday evening...
...situation was too much for the jangled nerves of Arkansas' J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "We are not bankrupt," said he to the Senate, "but we do look as if we are determined to end up the richest, fattest, most smug and complacent people who ever failed to meet the test of survival...