Word: smugness
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...most of the college generation do not even care to play the game. Although they will vehemently deny, offendedly, they charge of being a conformist, they fail to present evidence in their defense. Beneath it all lies the content, self-as-sured attitude of fitting into the pattern, the smug satisfaction of worrying about little and caring about even less...
...hero, James Dixon, is a barely competent provincial instructor in medieval history who has no desire to be a gentleman; he wants merely to be a safe and smug academic bureaucrat. His character has not been tempered on the playing fields of Eton, and he is as proud of his beer tastes as he is irritated by his beer income. To hold on to his teaching post he becomes involved in a series of tawdry, inept and sometimes hilarious maneuvers. This display of self-serving clownmanship has catapulted his saga through 18 printings and left countless Britons alternately fuming...
...against him, and there has been a strong prosecution and a weak defense. When the stage is set around the jury-room table, an immediate vote shows eleven for Guilty and one for Not Guilty. The dissenter, Henry Fonda, begins a long haul against the prejudices, inhibitions and smug certainty of the other jurors to bring out the actualities of the murder night. In doing so, the inner actualities of his fellow citizens are laid bare...
...seems to be a race for expectability. Even love rears its precious little head to add a tired touch of creeping sentimentality. And, regrettably, the author has felt satisfied with stocking the stage with a cast of cliches: the idealist; a shabby-willed congressman who needs an issue; his smug colleague in the other Party; two excessively stupid sleuths from the FBI; a secretary who needs romance; and an asthmatic lump of sex from the botanist's home town. The only mildly refreshing character in the Capital seems to be a likeable old rogue with a supply of bourbon...
...Your smug claim to omniscience is so damn nauseating. Eisenhower-Nixon's re-election meant that "a new political generation had come of age with promising concepts of how Government ought to be run." I'm happy to be associated with those apostles of error in Government affairs: Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, George Kennan and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt...