Leon Kass Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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