Leon Kass Quotes

#1. Human life without death would be something other than human; consciousness of mortality gives rise to our deepest longings and greatest accomplishments. - LEON KASS, CHAIR OF THE PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION ON BIOETHICS, 2003

Ray Kurzweil

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

#4. In some crucial cases ... repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason's power completely to articulate it.

Leon R. Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

#9. The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.

Leon Kass

#10. 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

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

#17. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

#22. 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

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

#28. Although not all flesh is forbidden, everything that is forbidden is flesh.

Leon R. Kass

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

Leon Kass

#30. What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to flourish?

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

#34. 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

#35. 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

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

#42. 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

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

#47. 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

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

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

Leon Kass

#52. 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