Art & Creativity Quote by Anna Quindlen

Quindlen’s line is a neat little boomerang: it leaves your hand as moral bewilderment and comes back as an indictment of hypocrisy. The “I will never understand” opener isn’t really confusion; it’s a rhetorical side-eye, the kind a columnist uses to signal that the behavior on display isn’t just wrong, it’s unserious. By framing the targets as “righteous,” she quotes their self-image while quietly puncturing it. Righteousness, in her telling, is less a principle than a costume.

The engine of the sentence is the collision between “opposition to sexual freedom” and “letters full of filthy words.” Quindlen isn’t arguing abstractly about permissiveness; she’s spotlighting the way censorship movements and purity campaigns so often smuggle in voyeurism. If your protest requires graphic vocabulary, you’re advertising an obsession with the very thing you claim to hate. The “filthy words” aren’t incidental; they’re evidence. Language becomes the tell, the slip of the mask.

Context matters here: Quindlen wrote in an era when culture-war skirmishes played out through complaint letters, editorial pages, school boards, and watchdog groups policing books, TV, and public decency. Her point anticipates today’s outrage economy, where performative disgust fuels attention and power. The subtext is that moral panic isn’t just about protecting anyone; it’s about controlling the terms of public speech while indulging in it. By focusing on the method rather than the slogan, Quindlen exposes how easily “values” become a cover for prurience, and how protest can mirror the thing it claims to oppose.