Leon Kass quotes
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“The technical is not just the machinery. The technical is a disposition to life.”
-- Leon Kass -
“Almost everybody is enthusiastic about the promise of biotechnology to cure disease and to relieve suffering.”
-- Leon Kass -
“In cloning, in contrast, reproduction is asexual - the cloned child is the product not of two but of one.”
-- Leon Kass -
“Biology, meaning the science of all life, is a late notion.”
-- Leon Kass -
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“Even if certain rogue countries do things we wish nobody did, it doesn't necessarily mean that their foolishness should justify our following suit.”
-- Leon Kass -
“I don't believe that efforts to prohibit only so-called reproductive cloning can be successful.”
-- Leon Kass -
“I don't like being forced to reduce my thoughts to sound bites.”
-- Leon Kass -
“I have nothing against respecting people who lived before, but we have no responsibility toward them.”
-- Leon Kass -
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“I've been opposed to human cloning from the very beginning.”
-- Leon Kass -
“Once you put human life in human hands, you have started on a slippery slope that knows no boundaries.”
-- Leon Kass -
“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.”
-- Leon Kass -
“We owe our existence to our parents, but we actually didn't have a choice.”
-- Leon Kass -
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“The neuroscience area - which is absolutely in its infancy - is much more important than genetics.”
-- Leon Kass -
“The benefits of biomedical progress are obvious, clear, and powerful. The hazards are much less well appreciated.”
-- Leon Kass -
“The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.”
-- Leon Kass -
“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.”
-- Leon Kass -
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“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.”
-- Leon Kass -
“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.”
-- Leon Kass -
“Our only responsibility is to live our own life and take care of our own children.”
-- Leon Kass -
“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.”
-- Leon Kass -
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“We may simply not be wise enough to do some of the kinds of engineering things that people are talking about doing.”
-- Leon Kass -
“If one is seriously interested in preventing reproductive cloning, one must stop the process before it starts.”
-- Leon Kass -
“Cloning looks like a degrading of parenthood and a perversion of the right relation between parents and children.”
-- Leon Kass -
“In the case of abortion, one pits the life of the fetus against the interests of the pregnant woman.”
-- Leon Kass -
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“Cloning represents a very clear, powerful, and immediate example in which we are in danger of turning procreation into manufacture.”
-- Leon Kass -
“Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.”
-- Leon Kass -
“Many other countries have already banned human cloning, and there are efforts at the UN to make such a ban universal.”
-- Leon Kass -
“Human life without death would be something other than human; consciousness of mortality gives rise to out deepest longings and greatest accomplishments.”
-- Leon Kass -
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“It's very hard to make arguments about the effects of cloning on family relations if family relations are in tatters.”
-- Leon Kass -
“An enormous amount of direct advertising from pharmaceutical companies are offering a kind of instantaneous solution to problems.”
-- Leon Kass -
“One could look over the past century and ask oneself, has the increased longevity been good, bad or indifferent?”
-- Leon Kass -
“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.”
-- Leon Kass -
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“Sexuality itself means mortality - equally for both man and woman.”
-- Leon Kass -
“Technological innovation is indeed important to economic growth and the enhancement of human possibilities.”
-- Leon Kass -
“If you have easy self-contentment, you might have a very, very cheap source of happiness.”
-- Leon Kass -
“Many people recognize that technology often comes with unintended and undesirable side effects.”
-- Leon Kass -
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“The abortion controversy is important for what it says about our stance toward procreation and children altogether.”
-- Leon Kass -
“There is a lot of hype and fear about this much-talked-about prospect of designer babies.”
-- Leon Kass -
“Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder”
-- Leon KassSource : Leon Kass, James Q. Wilson (1998). “The Ethics of Human Cloning”, p.19, American Enterprise Institute
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“We know next to nothing of what we're going to know in 20 or 50 years.”
-- Leon Kass -
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“We are somehow natured, not just to reproduce, but for sociality and even for culture.”
-- Leon Kass -
“We are enmeshed in a lineage that came from somewhere and is going to make way for the next generation.”
-- Leon Kass -
“The technological way of thinking has infected even ethics, which is supposed to be thinking about the good.”
-- Leon Kass -
“The so-called right to reproduce is not an unlimited right.”
-- Leon Kass -
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“There's an ancient tension between wanting to savor the world as it is and wanting to improve on the world as given.”
-- Leon Kass
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