Quotes from Leon Kass

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the case of abortion, one pits the life of the fetus against the interests of the pregnant woman.

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

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

Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.

Why does the benefactor love the recipient more than the recipient loves the benefactor? Because the benefactor lives in the recipient, the way in which the poet lives in the poem.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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