Quotes from Leon Kass

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

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

The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

We are somehow natured, not just to reproduce, but for sociality and even for culture.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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