Leon Kass Quotes

One could look over the past century and ask oneself, has the increased longevity been good, bad or indifferent?

We owe our existence to our parents, but we actually didn't have a choice.

It's very hard to make arguments about the effects of cloning on family relations if family relations are in tatters.

Many people recognize that technology often comes with unintended and undesirable side effects.

In the case of abortion, one pits the life of the fetus against the interests of the pregnant woman.

Is it possible to covet a much longer life for one's self and be as devoted to the well-being of the next generation? It's a long argument.

An enormous amount of direct advertising from pharmaceutical companies are offering a kind of instantaneous solution to problems.

Human life without death would be something other than human; consciousness of mortality gives rise to out deepest longings and greatest accomplishments.

As bad as it might be to destroy a creature made in God's image, it might be very much worse to be creating them after images of one's own.

I have nothing against respecting people who lived before, but we have no responsibility toward them.

We may simply not be wise enough to do some of the kinds of engineering things that people are talking about doing.

The technical is not just the machinery. The technical is a disposition to life.

I've been opposed to human cloning from the very beginning.

Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder

The so-called right to reproduce is not an unlimited right.

Almost everybody is enthusiastic about the promise of biotechnology to cure disease and to relieve suffering.

Sexuality itself means mortality - equally for both man and woman.

We are somehow natured, not just to reproduce, but for sociality and even for culture.

There's an ancient tension between wanting to savor the world as it is and wanting to improve on the world as given.

The technological way of thinking has infected even ethics, which is supposed to be thinking about the good.

Perhaps you could sympathize with those who seek to replace a dead child with a copy, or to copy a parent or a relative or even a celebrity.

The neuroscience area - which is absolutely in its infancy - is much more important than genetics.

If you have easy self-contentment, you might have a very, very cheap source of happiness.

Biology, meaning the science of all life, is a late notion.

The abortion controversy is important for what it says about our stance toward procreation and children altogether.

We are enmeshed in a lineage that came from somewhere and is going to make way for the next generation.

I don't like being forced to reduce my thoughts to sound bites.

If one is seriously interested in preventing reproductive cloning, one must stop the process before it starts.

I don't believe that efforts to prohibit only so-called reproductive cloning can be successful.

Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.

Once you put human life in human hands, you have started on a slippery slope that knows no boundaries.

The benefits of biomedical progress are obvious, clear, and powerful. The hazards are much less well appreciated.

The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.

There is a lot of hype and fear about this much-talked-about prospect of designer babies.

Technological innovation is indeed important to economic growth and the enhancement of human possibilities.

Our only responsibility is to live our own life and take care of our own children.

My job is to provide the president with the richest possible consideration, so that he knows what is at stake in whatever decision he makes.

We know next to nothing of what we're going to know in 20 or 50 years.

Cloning represents a very clear, powerful, and immediate example in which we are in danger of turning procreation into manufacture.

Many other countries have already banned human cloning, and there are efforts at the UN to make such a ban universal.

In cloning, in contrast, reproduction is asexual - the cloned child is the product not of two but of one.

Cloning looks like a degrading of parenthood and a perversion of the right relation between parents and children.

Even if certain rogue countries do things we wish nobody did, it doesn't necessarily mean that their foolishness should justify our following suit.