I regret exceedingly that the disputes between the protestants and Roman Catholics should be carried to the serious alarming height mentioned in your letters. Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause; and I was not without hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy of the present age would have put an effectual stop to contentions of this kind.
The Catholics and Protestants … are occupied in nothing but cutting each other’s throats.
If you think about Protestant and Catholic or Shiite and Sunni, they are basically the same thing... one eats with their left hand, the other eats with their right hand.
Put the Protestant flint and the Catholic steel together, and you will kindle a fire that will burn all around the world.
Now a Protestant confronting a Catholic ghost is exactly Shakespeare's way of grappling with what was not simply a general social problem but one lived out in his own life.
When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?
… very dangerous … because its aim is to introduce a mingling of Protestants and Catholics
We Irishman, Protestant and Catholic, born and bred in a land of religious controversy should never forget that we now live and act in a land of the fullest religious and civil liberties.
