Leon Kass famous quotes

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

#Disposition #Machinery

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

#Promise #Suffering #Disease

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

#Children #Two #Cloning

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

#Life Is #Biology #Notion

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

#Country #Mean #Wish

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

#Believe #Successful #Effort

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

#Sound #My Thoughts

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

#Responsibility #People

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

#Cloning #Human Cloning #Humans

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

#Hands #Slippery Slope #Boundaries

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

#Self #Long #Generations

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

#Choices #Parent #Existence

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

#Important #Genetics #Infancy

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

#Powerful #Progress #Hazards

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

#Animal #Social #Humans

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

#Real #Emotional #Law

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

#Children #Parent #Copies

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

#Jobs #Decision #President

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

#Children #Responsibility #Care

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

#Creating #Might #Made

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

#Wise #Engineering #Talking

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

#Cloning #Process

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

#Children #Parent #Looks

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

#Pregnancy #Abortion #Fetus

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

#Powerful #Example #Cloning

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

#Brain #Mind #Genetics

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

#Country #Effort #Cloning

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

#Giving #Accomplishment #Religion

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

#Cloning #Argument #Relation

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

#Offering #Kind #Advertising

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

#Past #Looks #Century

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

#Children #Want #Steps

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

#Mean #Men #Sexuality

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

#Innovation #Growth #Important

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

#Happy #Self #Contentment

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

#Technology #People #Sides

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

#Children #Abortion #Important

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

#Baby #Hype #Perspective

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

#Soul #Forgotten #Shallow

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

#Years #Next

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

#Culture

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

#Generations #Way #Next

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

#Thinking #Way #Ethics

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

#Unlimited

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

#World #Ancient #Given