Word: smugness
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...debate was well worth the wear and tear. Beyond the wild alarums of the critics and President Eisenhower's smug claim of last January that he knew more about defense than anybody else, it engendered some long-overdue rethinking of U.S. defense policies. For one thing, the Administration finally made up its mind to concentrate on an array of offensive missiles and bombers, and to chuck expensive defensive systems (TIME, April 18). And last week the prestigious House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, in a thoughtful audit, generally endorsed the Administration's "mixed-force concept" of missiles and bombers...
...already the testimony had been such that staid, strait-laced Geneva-the society that ignores tourists and scorns international conclaves -is not likely to be the same for a long time to come. Said a Swiss-German lawyer of the Swiss-French city: "This is the undoing of the smug Genevois society, the curse of immobile prosperity in this self-centered community which likes to call itself Calvinist...
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...