Quotes by Leon Kass

• An enormous amount of direct advertising from pharmaceutical companies are offering a kind of instantaneous solution to problems.
• I don't believe that efforts to prohibit only so-called reproductive cloning can be successful.
• We owe our existence to our parents, but we actually didn't have a choice.
• We may simply not be wise enough to do some of the kinds of engineering things that people are talking about doing.
• What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to flourish?
• We know next to nothing of what we're going to know in 20 or 50 years.
• We are somehow natured, not just to reproduce, but for sociality and even for culture.
• Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.
• Even if certain rogue countries do things we wish nobody did, it doesn't necessarily mean that their foolishness should justify our following suit.
• Cloning represents a very clear, powerful, and immediate example in which we are in danger of turning procreation into manufacture.
• Cloning looks like a degrading of parenthood and a perversion of the right relation between parents and children.
• 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.
• Almost everybody is enthusiastic about the promise of biotechnology to cure disease and to relieve suffering.
• We should never rush into folly just because other nations are practicing it.
• Biology, meaning the science of all life, is a late notion.
• The neuroscience area - which is absolutely in its infancy - is much more important than genetics.
• One should proceed with caution. We may simply not be wise enough to do some of the kinds of engineering things that people are talking about doing.
• Our only responsibility is to live our own life and take care of our own children.
• 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.
• Sexuality itself means mortality - equally for both man and woman.
• Technological innovation is indeed important to economic growth and the enhancement of human possibilities.
• The abortion controversy is important for what it says about our stance toward procreation and children altogether.
• One could look over the past century and ask oneself, has the increased longevity been good, bad or indifferent?
• 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.
• The so-called right to reproduce is not an unlimited right.
• The technical is not just the machinery. The technical is a disposition to life.
• The technological way of thinking has infected even ethics, which is supposed to be thinking about the good.
• There were certain questions about the foundations of morals that advances in science all threaten to make more complicated.
• There's an ancient tension between wanting to savor the world as it is and wanting to improve on the world as given.
• I don't like being forced to reduce my thoughts to sound bites.
• The benefits of biomedical progress are obvious, clear, and powerful. The hazards are much less well appreciated.
• In the case of abortion, one pits the life of the fetus against the interests of the pregnant woman.
• We are enmeshed in a lineage that came from somewhere and is going to make way for the next generation.
• I've been opposed to human cloning from the very beginning.
• I have nothing against respecting people who lived before, but we have no responsibility toward them.
• If one is seriously interested in preventing reproductive cloning, one must stop the process before it starts.
• Once you put human life in human hands, you have started on a slippery slope that knows no boundaries.
• In cloning, in contrast, reproduction is asexual - the cloned child is the product not of two but of one.
• 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.
• It seems to me that a kind of thinking which is not technocratic has an opportunity for a renaissance in this country.
• 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.
• It's very hard to make arguments about the effects of cloning on family relations if family relations are in tatters.
• Limits have to be set on how far one can simply use the... cleverness that we have to make changes.
• Many other countries have already banned human cloning, and there are efforts at the UN to make such a ban universal.
• Many people recognize that technology often comes with unintended and undesirable side effects.
• Nobody knew in advance that in vitro fertilization would be, by and large, safe.
• If you have easy self-contentment, you might have a very, very cheap source of happiness.