Top 52 Quotes & Sayings by Leon Kass

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to flourish?

We should never rush into folly just because other nations are practicing it.

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

It seems to me that a kind of thinking which is not technocratic has an opportunity for a renaissance in this country.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Limits have to be set on how far one can simply use the... cleverness that we have to make changes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody knew in advance that in vitro fertilization would be, by and large, safe.

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.

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

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

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

There were certain questions about the foundations of morals that advances in science all threaten to make more complicated.

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.

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

Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder