Leon Kass Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. — Leon Kass

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal. — Leon Kass

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

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

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

Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder — Leon Kass

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to flourish? — Leon Kass

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

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

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

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