Success Quote by Charles Revson

Revson’s line has the polished sting of a man who sold glamour for a living and understood that reputations are both priceless and, with the right packaging, negotiable. By pairing “accuracy” with “virtue,” he borrows an old, loaded social code: once a “lady’s” virtue is questioned, the damage is permanent. The joke lands because he’s not really talking about women; he’s talking about asymmetry. Newspapers can injure, then tidy up after themselves with a ritual apology that rarely travels as far as the original harm.

The retraction is the punchline and the indictment. It’s a small-print moral escape hatch built into the business model of mass attention: sensational claims get the banner headline; corrections get the back page, if they appear at all. Revson’s background matters here. As a mid-century cosmetics titan, he lived in a world where perception drives value and where “truth” is often less important than what people remember. In that light, the quote reads as a businessman’s cold appraisal of media incentives, not a romantic lament about journalistic ideals.

There’s also a quiet cynicism about accountability. Virtue, in the old metaphor, is policed socially and irrevocably; accuracy, in Revson’s framing, is policed procedurally and reversibly. The subtext is a warning: when institutions can “fix” wrongdoing with paperwork, they’ll treat harm as a cost of doing business. That’s not just a critique of newspapers; it’s a critique of any industry that can monetize first impressions and outsource the consequences to footnotes.