Tolerance

A person is the most precious thing in the universe. A person is made in the image and likeness of God: every person bears within himself the divine resemblance. The state exists for the person and not the person for the state. No Yoruba man, Ibo man or Hausa man is to be tolerated! As person, they are all to be loved. We have misunderstood tolerance when we say that one must be tolerant to certain persons.

Tolerance and intolerance apply to two totally different things. Tolerance applies only to persons, but never to principles; intolerance applies only to principles but never to persons. We must be absolutely intolerant about the truths of mathematics, but we must be tolerant to the mathematician. We must not be broad-minded when we receive our bills and say that twenty and twenty may make sixty; but we must be tolerant to the grocer who makes error.
Nothing is so fearfully exclusive as truth. We must be intolerant about truth, for that is God’s making and not ours. We must be tolerant to persons, for they are human and liable to error.

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Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience towards evil, and a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. But what is more important than the definition is the field of its application. The important point here is this: Tolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth.

Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons. Tolerance applies to the erring; intolerance to the error. The love of God and man, as an ideal, has lately been replaced by the new ideal of tolerance which inspires no sacrifices. Why should any human being in the world be merely tolerated? What man has ever made a sacrifice in the name of tolerance? It leads man , instead to express their own egotism In a book or a lecture that patronizes the downtrodden group. One of the cruelest things that can happen to a human being is to be tolerated.