Leon Kass Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But veteran lawmakers torn apart by PTSD don't have a choice about being Exhibit A in the case against Washington politics. When you see what can happen to a page or a junior congressman, it passes on in a very real way, not in a history-class sense, that reality of what political power really is, .. Who are we to impose this emotional albatross on public servants? As a nation, we pretend to elect our leaders. It seems unjust to make them a special class to suffer for our sins over wrongheaded laws, or pay a continuing emotional price for securing their future careers.

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

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.

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.

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

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

It's a short step from the belief that every child should be wanted to the belief that a child exists to satisfy our wants.

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

The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.

Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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