Love Quote by Rob Morrow

“I love the idea of rectitude” lands like a confession dressed up as a compliment. Rob Morrow isn’t praising rectitude so much as admitting a gap between aspiration and practice. The operative phrase is “the idea of”: rectitude is attractive at a safe distance, like a clean conscience in a museum case. He’s drawn to the clarity, the straight lines, the fantasy that morality can be engineered into a life the way you engineer a plot.

Coming from an actor, the subtext gets sharper. Actors make a living inhabiting people who insist they’re principled while bending those principles under pressure. “Rectitude” is also a performance word: it suggests posture, public correctness, the kind of uprightness that reads well on camera and in conversation. Loving its “idea” hints at how often virtue functions as branding - a self we’d like to be seen as - even when the messier self keeps showing up off-script.

There’s a cultural moment embedded here, too: late-20th-century and post-90s America has been obsessed with moral certainty while becoming more skeptical about anyone who claims to possess it. “Rectitude” sounds faintly old-fashioned, almost puritanical, which makes the affection feel ironic: he’s seduced by an antique standard he probably doesn’t entirely trust.

The line works because it’s compact self-awareness. It flatters the listener’s respect for integrity, then quietly undercuts the whole premise: wanting goodness is easy; living it is the hard part.