Word: smug
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...despite these regional issues, despite mounting popular disenchantment with its rule, Congress would not have fared as badly as it did had its own house been in order. Unfortunately, it was not. Twenty years of uninterrupted enjoyment of power had made it smug and arrogant, engendered in its top leaders a false confidence in their own invulnerability. One reflection of this could be seen in their uncompromising attitude towards the dissidents inside their party, the continued and relentless exclusion of the latter from all position of authority. The bitter infighting that followed this led to large-scale expulsions and resignations...
...many divergent types work-most of the time-in such close harmony? As one violinist explains: "There is one glorious counter-stress that makes everything worthwhile-the joy of making music." And, it might also be added, with the smug certainty that the fellow up there waving a stick at them is a musical ignoramus as well as an exhibitionist...
...Negro candidates, the eleven-year-old Bahamian Party had managed to hold onto power largely through the divisions within the opposition and the apathy of Negro voters, who seemed not to want a change. Thus the party went into last week's election with an almost smug unconcern; it staged no rallies, and its leaders in government even refused interviews. The 14-year-old Progressive Liberal Party, however, campaigned on all the main islands, plastered car and truck bumpers with stickers, and tacked up posters everywhere...
Gambit. A perfect crime is like a soup-can skyscraper in a supermarket. Its smug symmetry, the hubris of it all, inspires the naughty little boy in everybody with a devilish desire to give the arrogant thing a nudge and bring it down in a thundering great heap. In Gambit, the naughty little boy in everybody should have the time of his life...
...important art exhibitions are concerned," wrote Canaday, "New York is becoming a cultural backwater. Our smug conviction that we are the art center of the country has only the weakest justification: we are only the center where the most buying and selling of art goes on, and we are not really much interested in art except as a sales product, whether the sales pitch is in dollars and cents or in the race to" be first with esthetic novelties...