Top 40 Leon R. Kass Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

3. “In cloning, in contrast, reproduction is asexual – the cloned child is the product not of two but of one.”

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

5. “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 R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

8. “I don’t like being forced to reduce my thoughts to sound bites.”

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

16. “Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.”

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

21. “The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.”

— Leon R. Kass

22. “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 R. Kass

23. “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 R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

25. “I’ve been opposed to human cloning from the very beginning.”

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

27. “The neuroscience area – which is absolutely in its infancy – is much more important than genetics.”

— Leon R. Kass

28. “It’s very hard to make arguments about the effects of cloning on family relations if family relations are in tatters.”

— Leon R. Kass

29. “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 R. Kass

30. “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 R. Kass

31. “Sexuality itself means mortality – equally for both man and woman.”

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

35. “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 R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

38. “We know next to nothing of what we’re going to know in 20 or 50 years.”

— Leon R. Kass

39. “We owe our existence to our parents, but we actually didn’t have a choice.”

— Leon R. Kass

40. “There’s an ancient tension between wanting to savor the world as it is and wanting to improve on the world as given.”

— Leon R. Kass

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

— Leon R. Kass

42. “I don’t believe that efforts to prohibit only so-called reproductive cloning can be successful.”

— Leon R. Kass