It wasn't a directed statement but a general one.

"Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups."

The obvious default interpretation of your comment is that the other person is using something as an excuse. If you say you did not intend it as a personal putdown, I believe you, but the rest of us don't have direct access to your intent, so you'd need to include enough information in your comments to disambiguate it.

More information here in case helpful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

As for Marion Milner's classic paragraph, I'm delighted that you found it worthwhile enough to quote! But you have to read the entire paragraph to understand it, and you can't leave out the word "toleration". That's the most important word there, both in the text and in the title.