What is "smugness"

Usage examples of "smugness".

And the Howards seemed to be polished, accomplished people, with none of that gombeen smugness he had expected.

He understood the perfidy that lay beneath the smugness of the three men who were his clients: Rowling, Blogg and Marker.

Was it only his natural reaction to the smugness, the hypocrisy, the sellout mentality of the world he had not seen upclose for nearly four years?

It was difficult to dent the smugness of a man like Yeddo, but The Shadow had accomplished it.

The ease with which he could have strangled her, throttled the smugness swimming in accusatory preservative behind her goggle glasses.

You see, Denby, I firmly believe that you are nothing but an old humper, incapable, particularly after imbibing wine, of determining what it is you are in congress with, Harcourt said with great smugness.

I was stationed in Paris and occasionally in London at that time, and fascinating though those capitals were to a young American happy to have escaped from the incredible smugness and emptiness of the Calvin Coolidge era, they paled a little when one came to Berlin and Munich.

But the smidgeon of smugness tugging at his sensuous mouth sent heat spiking into her cheeks.

That smugness was eroded when the Soviets exploded their own nuclear device, and the arms race was on.

The hint of smugness enraged Pappas and a suddenly realized solution came as a bolt from the blue.

I remembered Earth, with its pettiness, its greed and vanity, its smugness, its pretensions, its pollutions and poisons, its teeming, crowded, miserable populations, and its endemic fears, fears such as that of not having enough energy to spin the wheels of an exorbitant and largely unnecessary technology, and the fear, fully warranted, of the falling of the sword of a nuclear Damocles.

The shadow of the Senate was always replete with scroungers, forgers, black marketeers, operating under the premise that there were more guards per square meter here than anywhere else on Romulus, and where better to conduct one’s illicit business than right beneath their noses because, in their bureaucratic smugness, the powers that were assumed no one would dare?