Word: smugly
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...conferees found nothing to feel smug about. "The imprint of Christian culture in Asia is lighter than the West assumes," said Visser 't Hooft. Said Dr. Mackay, president of Princeton Theological Seminary,' who has spent the past two months in the Far East: "There's a tremendous void in the heart of East Asia. The ancient religions are unable to explain the revolutionary changes that are taking place, or have no adequate ideas or attitudes with which to meet them...
From the Communists there was smug mirth. Their press mocked America's "atomaniacs." In Italy, pro-Soviet Socialist Leader Pietro Nenni (just back from a 15-day junket to another "peace" congress in Moscow) proudly pinpointed the site of the explosion in "eastern Siberia." In the town of Santeramo near Bari, Communists got the news in the middle of the night, raced in nightshirts and dressing gowns to a hasty rally where a speaker promised: "We Communists will have our headquarters at the White House! Washington shall be ours...
...clearly brought a recognition of evil back into a world that had been bemused for a hundred years with the idea of automatic, illimitable progress (i.e., heaven by osmosis). The world of 1949 was not one to call forth admiration; but it was no longer a smug world. It had not solved its problems, but it had begun to face them...
...that in these tough times the best hope for mankind is for idealists to build "oases" of humaneness and brotherly love. Stringing along with them, largely out of spiteful hope of seeing the experiment fail, are "the realists," cynical ex-Commies who still retain ("from their Leninist days") the smug and fanciful notion that they are a revolutionary elite. Steeped in a Marx-cum-Freud conviction that no man can "resist history, environment, class structure, psychic conditioning," the realists take for granted that all oases which spring from mere individual initiative are sure to be mirages...
...strikers showed no signs of going back to work and Comrade Williams, smug in his office beside Sydney's harbor, seemed satisfied that everything was going along just fine. Australians set themselves for a long, cold winter...