Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I have nothing against respecting people who lived before, but we have no responsibility toward them.
Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder
I've been opposed to human cloning from the very beginning.
Biology, meaning the science of all life, is a late notion.
The so-called right to reproduce is not an unlimited right.
The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.
I don't like being forced to reduce my thoughts to sound bites.
Sexuality itself means mortality - equally for both man and woman.
What does it mean to be an individual? What does it mean to flourish?
We know next to nothing of what we're going to know in 20 or 50 years.
We owe our existence to our parents, but we actually didn't have a choice.
We should never rush into folly just because other nations are practicing it.
Nobody knew in advance that in vitro fertilization would be, by and large, safe.
The technical is not just the machinery. The technical is a disposition to life.
Our only responsibility is to live our own life and take care of our own children.
We are somehow natured, not just to reproduce, but for sociality and even for culture.
There is a lot of hype and fear about this much-talked-about prospect of designer babies.
If you have easy self-contentment, you might have a very, very cheap source of happiness.
Genetics is crude, but neuroscience goes directly to work on the brain, and the mind follows.
Many people recognize that technology often comes with unintended and undesirable side effects.
I don't believe that efforts to prohibit only so-called reproductive cloning can be successful.
The neuroscience area - which is absolutely in its infancy - is much more important than genetics.
Limits have to be set on how far one can simply use the... cleverness that we have to make changes.
In the case of abortion, one pits the life of the fetus against the interests of the pregnant woman.
Once you put human life in human hands, you have started on a slippery slope that knows no boundaries.
We are enmeshed in a lineage that came from somewhere and is going to make way for the next generation.
In cloning, in contrast, reproduction is asexual - the cloned child is the product not of two but of one.
Technological innovation is indeed important to economic growth and the enhancement of human possibilities.
The technological way of thinking has infected even ethics, which is supposed to be thinking about the good.
Almost everybody is enthusiastic about the promise of biotechnology to cure disease and to relieve suffering.
If one is seriously interested in preventing reproductive cloning, one must stop the process before it starts.
One could look over the past century and ask oneself, has the increased longevity been good, bad or indifferent?
The benefits of biomedical progress are obvious, clear, and powerful. The hazards are much less well appreciated.
Cloning looks like a degrading of parenthood and a perversion of the right relation between parents and children.
We may simply not be wise enough to do some of the kinds of engineering things that people are talking about doing.
The abortion controversy is important for what it says about our stance toward procreation and children altogether.
There's an ancient tension between wanting to savor the world as it is and wanting to improve on the world as given.
It's very hard to make arguments about the effects of cloning on family relations if family relations are in tatters.
Many other countries have already banned human cloning, and there are efforts at the UN to make such a ban universal.
It seems to me that a kind of thinking which is not technocratic has an opportunity for a renaissance in this country.
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.
There were certain questions about the foundations of morals that advances in science all threaten to make more complicated.
An enormous amount of direct advertising from pharmaceutical companies are offering a kind of instantaneous solution to problems.
Cloning represents a very clear, powerful, and immediate example in which we are in danger of turning procreation into manufacture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Even if certain rogue countries do things we wish nobody did, it doesn't necessarily mean that their foolishness should justify our following suit.
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.
