Word: smug
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...FAMILY lives 40 miles from the nearest movie theater and the nearest McDonalds, on a farm in a rural county where cows outnumber people two to one. Smug city dwellers often ask how I managed to entertain myself while growing up in such an isolated backwater...
Whether or not legacy admissions is a minority issue, The Crimson makes the unfounded claim that minority students sit smug and self-assured with the knowledge that their children will some day be favored. Minority students do not revel in their future progenies' expected privileges, as Joshua Li's out-of-context quotation seems to imply. There is a vast difference between joyously embracing the legacy policy and making the observation that the legacy policy will play a part in our future...
This whole strange country that can endlessly fool itself and be fooled and yet retain a saving common sense; this materialistic, money-driven country that is constantly caught up in moral, sometimes naively moralistic struggles; this smug country that is relentlessly self-critical; this freest of all countries in the world, living both the dangers and the triumphs of freedom...
Most interventionists cheered Luce's appeal. But even some of them were disturbed by the missionary's son's missionary zeal. The Nation called Luce's program magnanimous but also smug and self-righteous. The Literary Magazine at his alma mater, Yale, called it "jingoistic jargon." Luce's favorite theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, later wrote that the very title implied an "egoistic corruption...
...Peter Wexler is a crank. It has something to do with his belief that everybody is a liar or, as he puts it, "smug and self-satisfied and just close enough to the facts to get by." When young Holden Caulfield complained about phonies, it had the force of discovery. Wexler's grownup bitching sounds more than a little gratuitous. Wife Lily breaks the news sweetly: "These aren't great complaints, you know. They're tired, and small, and self-serving, they're vague -- if I weren't wife-of-wives I'm not certain I'd be charmed...