Quotes By 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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