If a stroke of undeserved luck has kept the mental composition of some individuals not quite adjusted to the prevailing norms—a stroke of luck they have often enough to pay for in their relations with their environment—it is up to these individuals to make the moral and, as it were, representative effort to say what most of those for whom they say it cannot see or, to do justice to reality, will not allow themselves to see. Direct communicability to everyone is not a criterion of truth. We must resist the all but universal compulsion to confuse the communication of knowledge with knowledge itself, and to rate it higher, if possible—whereas at present each communicative step is falsifying the truth and selling it out. Meanwhile, whatever has to do with language suffers of this paradoxicality.

From Theodor W. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973 (first published in 1966), p. 41.