Word: smugness
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...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...
...town whose attitude toward Shirley is somewhat more analytical. They focus on the calculation behind the talent, enjoy the "natural" comedienne but see the cool planning that makes her tick. They take pleasure in her company, as did the friend who squired her to Santa Anita one afternoon, smug in the knowledge that she had telephoned a gagwriter and announced: "I'm going to the races. Give me ten jokes on racing...
...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...
...more pedestrian note, the Alosp brothers concentrate nearly a third of their book, The Reporter's Trade, on an attack on bureaucratic secrecy regulations and devote the rest of their space to smug discussion of how they got around these regulations. Their opening chapters on what it is like to be an aristocrat and a reporter, how Washington reporting has changed, and the mortal penalty a society pays for not facing its big decisions in the open are only occasionally either penetrating of powerful. The selected columns which make up the body of the volume are neither effective records...