Quotes By Leon Kass

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.

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

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

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

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