Best 37 quotes of Leon Kass on MyQuotes

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

In the case of abortion, one pits the life of the fetus against the interests of the pregnant 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's very hard to make arguments about the effects of cloning on family relations if family relations are in tatters.

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.