The More Refined the Error, the More Obscured the Truth
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing:
I do not know whether it be a duty to sacrifice happiness and life to truth. … But this much I know, that it is our duty, if we desire to teach truth, to teach it wholly or not at all, to teach it clearly and bluntly, unenigmatically, unreservedly, inspired with full confidence in its powers. …The cruder an error, the shorter and more direct is the path leading to truth. But a highly refined error is likely to keep us permanently estranged from truth, and will do so all the more readily in proportion as we find it difficulty to realise that it is an error. …One who thinks of conveying to mankind truths masked and rouged, may be truth’s pimp, but has never been truth’s lover.
Quoted in Rosa Luxemburg, Socialism or Barbarism, 250.