Leon Kass Quotes
"I don't believe that efforts to prohibit only so-called reproductive cloning can be successful."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Successful)
"We owe our existence to our parents, but we actually didn't have a choice."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Choice, Existence, Parents)
"We may simply not be wise enough to do some of the kinds of engineering things that people are talking about doing."
- Leon Kass
(Related: People, Engineering, May, Talking)
"What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to flourish?"
- Leon Kass
"We know next to nothing of what we're going to know in 20 or 50 years."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Nothing, Years)
"We are somehow natured, not just to reproduce, but for sociality and even for culture."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Culture)
"Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Work, Genetics, Mind)
"Even if certain rogue countries do things we wish nobody did, it doesn't necessarily mean that their foolishness should justify our following suit."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Countries, Foolishness)
"Cloning represents a very clear, powerful, and immediate example in which we are in danger of turning procreation into manufacture."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Danger, Example)
"Cloning looks like a degrading of parenthood and a perversion of the right relation between parents and children."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Children, Parenthood, Parents, 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."
- Leon Kass
(Related: God)
"Almost everybody is enthusiastic about the promise of biotechnology to cure disease and to relieve suffering."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Cure, Disease, Promise, Suffering)
"We should never rush into folly just because other nations are practicing it."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Folly, Nations)
"Biology, meaning the science of all life, is a late notion."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Science, Life, Meaning)
"The neuroscience area - which is absolutely in its infancy - is much more important than genetics."
- Leon Kass
(Related: 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."
- Leon Kass
(Related: People, Caution, Engineering, May, Talking)
"Our only responsibility is to live our own life and take care of our own children."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Life, Care, Children, Responsibility)
"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."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Celebrity)
"Sexuality itself means mortality - equally for both man and woman."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Man, Mortality, Sexuality, Woman)
"Technological innovation is indeed important to economic growth and the enhancement of human possibilities."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Growth, Innovation, Possibilities)
"The abortion controversy is important for what it says about our stance toward procreation and children altogether."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Abortion, Children, Controversy)
"One could look over the past century and ask oneself, has the increased longevity been good, bad or indifferent?"
- Leon Kass
(Related: Longevity, Past)
"The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal."
- Leon Kass
"There is a lot of hype and fear about this much-talked-about prospect of designer babies."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Fear, Babies)
"The so-called right to reproduce is not an unlimited right."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Right)
"The technical is not just the machinery. The technical is a disposition to life."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Life)
"The technological way of thinking has infected even ethics, which is supposed to be thinking about the good."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Ethics, Thinking)
"There were certain questions about the foundations of morals that advances in science all threaten to make more complicated."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Science, Morals, Questions)
"There's an ancient tension between wanting to savor the world as it is and wanting to improve on the world as given."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Tension, World)
"I don't like being forced to reduce my thoughts to sound bites."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Thoughts, Being, Sound)
"The benefits of biomedical progress are obvious, clear, and powerful. The hazards are much less well appreciated."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Progress, Benefits, Obvious)
"In the case of abortion, one pits the life of the fetus against the interests of the pregnant woman."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Life, Abortion, Woman)
"We are enmeshed in a lineage that came from somewhere and is going to make way for the next generation."
- Leon Kass
"I've been opposed to human cloning from the very beginning."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Beginning)
"I have nothing against respecting people who lived before, but we have no responsibility toward them."
- Leon Kass
(Related: People, Nothing, Responsibility)
"If one is seriously interested in preventing reproductive cloning, one must stop the process before it starts."
- Leon Kass
"Once you put human life in human hands, you have started on a slippery slope that knows no boundaries."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Life)
"In cloning, in contrast, reproduction is asexual - the cloned child is the product not of two but of one."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Contrast)
"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."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Life, Argument, Self)
"It seems to me that a kind of thinking which is not technocratic has an opportunity for a renaissance in this country."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Opportunity, Country, Thinking)
"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."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Belief)
"It's very hard to make arguments about the effects of cloning on family relations if family relations are in tatters."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Family, Arguments)
"Limits have to be set on how far one can simply use the... cleverness that we have to make changes."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Cleverness, Limits)
"Many other countries have already banned human cloning, and there are efforts at the UN to make such a ban universal."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Countries)
"Many people recognize that technology often comes with unintended and undesirable side effects."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Technology, People)
"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."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Decision, Consideration, Job, President)
"Nobody knew in advance that in vitro fertilization would be, by and large, safe."
- Leon Kass
"If you have easy self-contentment, you might have a very, very cheap source of happiness."
- Leon Kass
(Related: Happiness, Self)