Justice & Law Quote by Stuart Chase

Advertising’s oldest trick isn’t persuasion; it’s plausible deniability dressed up as charm. Stuart Chase skewers an industry logic that still runs on fumes today: the less you can be pinned down, the longer you can keep selling. A “concrete promise” is a legal hook and a reputational risk. It invites receipts, comparisons, and disappointment that can be measured. The “delightfully vague,” by contrast, is an all-purpose mirror. It lets consumers project their own fantasies onto a product and then blame themselves when reality doesn’t match the daydream.

Chase’s phrasing is doing double work. “Very first law” mimics the solemnity of scripture, as if admen have their own Ten Commandments, except the foundational ethic is evasion. “Cultivate” is the slyest verb here: vagueness isn’t an accident or a stylistic flourish; it’s a crop deliberately grown, optimized, and harvested. And “delightfully” is the poison in the dessert. He’s pointing at the way ambiguity isn’t merely tolerated, it’s engineered to feel pleasant - aspirational, classy, sophisticated, premium, “natural,” “better,” “up to.”

Context matters: Chase wrote during the rise of mass consumer culture, when branding began shifting from describing what a thing does to describing what it means. His line anticipates today’s wellness-speak and tech marketing, where words like “clean,” “smart,” and “reimagined” float above specifics. The subtext is blunt: when commerce can’t guarantee transformation, it sells the mood of transformation, and lets you do the rest.