Smugness Quotes

Confidence quickly curdles into arrogance; smarts turn to smugness, charm turns to smarm.

Jeffrey Kluger

Smart, Arrogance, Unbearable

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Next to "I win," "I told you so" are the sweetest words.

Gore Vidal

Winning, Next, Told You So

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San Franciscans have a bond of self-satisfaction bordering on smugness.

Herb Caen

Self, Satisfaction, Franciscans

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Put aside your pride,
Set down your arrogance,
And remember your grave.

Ali ibn Abi Talib

Wisdom, Islamic, Pride

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What matters are those ordinary acts of kindness and of love, not vaulting ambition with its attendant hubris and smugness.

Michael Dirda

Kindness, Ambition, What Matters

"Kurt Vonnegut". Live discussion, www.washingtonpost.com. April 12, 2007.

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It's a deep and all but certain truth about narcissistic personalities that to meet them is to love them, but to know them well is to find them unbearable. Confidence quickly curdles into arrogance; smarts turn to smugness, charm turns to smarm.

Jeffrey Kluger

Smart, Personality, Arrogance

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I have yet to find any support in the Bible for an attitude of smugness: Ah, they deserve their punishment; watch them squirm.

Philip Yancey

Attitude, Punishment, Support

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Complacency is a continuous struggle that we all have to fight.

Jack Nicklaus

Struggle, Fighting, Complacency

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Truth, acceptance of the truth, is a shattering experience. It shatters the binding shroud of culture trance. It rips apart smugness, arrogance, superiority, and self-importance. It requires acknowledgment of responsibility for the nature and quality of each of our own lives, our own inner lives as well as the life of the world. Truth, inwardly accepted, humbling truth, makes one vulnerable. You can't be right, self-righteous, and truthful at the same time.

Paula Gunn Allen

Truth, Rip, Responsibility

Paula Gunn Allen (1998). “Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-busting Border-crossing Loose Canons”, Boston, Mass. : Beacon Press

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As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behaviour toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.

Sri Aurobindo

Dog, Cat, Men

"Enemies, A Love Story". Book by Isaac Bashevis Singer, p. 257, 1972.

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There's something uniquely aggravating about the smugness of liberal Hollywood.

Matt Stone

Hollywood, Aggravating

"Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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What's wrong with "the new elite?" Forget cultural insularity or smugness. The main problem with the "new elite" is that they're not an elite at all. That is, they aren't particularly smart, or competent.

Glenn Reynolds

Smart, Political, Problem

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The world of the arts is by no means always comfortable, but neither is it likely ever to be boring. It is full of surprises, humor, traps for the unwary, and challenges to smugness. It is a world of moods as well as of revelation, of beliefs and fears, of unpleasant truth as well as of delicious fantasy. Perhaps it is arrogant to say that anyone who does not venture into this world is only half-interested in life. I say it, nonetheless.

Russell Lynes

Art, Mean, Challenges

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The higher up, the harder the fall.

Becca Fitzpatrick

Fall, Harder, Higher

Becca Fitzpatrick (2012). “Hush, Hush”, p.114, Simon and Schuster

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I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer?

Virginia Woolf

Hate, Worship You, Safety

Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.218, Delphi Classics

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We singer-songwriter people, we're used to getting up and doing our own thing in front of people, and we're it. We're the band, artist, writer, producer, front man. We're the whole thing. You develop, it's not smugness, but this self-reliance, that can limit your creativity. When you're willing and able to invite others into it, you wind up getting a piece of work that's bigger and better than anything you ever imagined it could be.

Andy Wilkinson

Writing, Creativity, Artist

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As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he always had the same thought: in their behavior toward creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme racist theories, the principle that might is right.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Animal, Men, Principles

"Enemies, A Love Story" by Isaac Bashevis Singer, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, (p. 257), 1972.

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There are many who profess to be religious and speak of themselves as Christians, and, according to one such, "as accepting the scriptures only as sources of inspiration and moral truth," and then ask in their smugness: "Do the revelations of God give us a handrail to the kingdom of God, as the Lord's messenger told Lehi, or merely a compass?"

Harold B. Lee

Christian, Religious, Inspiration

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I can say with pride verging on smugness that I've got two very successful shows that assume their audience is very smart.

Steven Moffat

Smart, Pride, Successful

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What the historian Elie Kedourie called "the Chatham House Version" - that toxic amalgam of smugness, moral relativism, and cherished feelings of guilt about the achievements of Western civilization - everywhere nurtured the catechism of established opinion.

Roger Kimball

Civilization, House, Achievement

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I hate to see complacency prevail in our lives when it's so directly contrary to the teaching of Christ.

Jimmy Carter

Hate, Teaching, Complacency

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But, actually, so many of the clerics that I've met, particularly the Church of England clerics, are people of such extraordinary smugness and arrogance and conceitedness who are extraordinarily presumptuous about the significance of their position in society.

Rowan Atkinson

People, Arrogance, Church

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Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, "Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it." Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.

Marilynne Robinson

Lonely, Night, People

Marilynne Robinson (2004). “Housekeeping: A Novel”, p.154, Macmillan

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when someone speaks he looks at a mouth, not eyes and their colors, which, it seems to him, will always alter depending on the light of a room, the minute of the day. Mouths reveal insecurity or smugness or any other point on the spectrum of character. For him they are the most intricate aspect of faces. He's never sure what an eye reveals. but he can read how mouths darken into callousness, suggest tenderness. One can often misjudge an eye from its reaction to a simple beam of sunlight.

Michael Ondaatje

Character, Eye, Simple

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Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards.

Nelson Algren

Self, Deception, Vision

Nelson Algren (1998). “Nonconformity: Writing on Writing”, p.85, Seven Stories Press

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