Quotes By Leon Kass

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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