Amos Oz Quotes

The basic fact is simple: life begins not at birth, but conception.

You cannot go into the womb to form the child; it is there and makes itself and comes forth whole-and there it is and you have made it and have felt it, but it has come itself.

The history of man for the nine months preceding his birth would, probably, be far more interesting and contain events of greater moment than all the three score and ten years that follow it.

Every man is an impossibility until he is born.

The minute those two little particles inside a woman's womb have joined together, billions of decisions have been made. A thing like that has to come from entropy.

I didn't know how babies were made until I was pregnant with my fourth child.

Life is the division of human cells, a process which begins at conception.

As a former fetus ....

We know that at conception, the genetic code is there for a unique individual. This is not something that is just a religious belief.

The process of the body changing and making a whole human fascinates me.

Since the conventional belief about human embryology is that genes control the development of the fetus, the mother's role in her child's gestation is deemed to be not much more than providing nutrition, feeding her child.

There is a moment of conception and a moment of birth, but between them there is a long period of gestation.

The vast majority of abortions are performed between the seventh and tenth week when the baby is already sucking his thumb, recoiling from pricking, responding to sound. All his organs are present, the brain is functioning, the heart is pumping, the liver is making blood cells, the kidneys are cleaning fluids, and there is a fingerprint. His genetic code is uniquely and unquestionably human. And, if we are willing, he can be seen by ultrasound.

It is a real issue, a measurement of our society, when we say it's fine to destroy unborn life who has a heartbeat at 16 days post-conception.

We all begin much much much earlier. In fact, every one of us - every nation, every individual begins hundreds, perhaps thousands of years prior to the date that appears in the passport.

Scientifically, there's no debate over whether the fetus is alive and human.

This work should commence with the conception of man, and should describe the nature of the womb, and how the child inhabits it, and in what stage it dwells there, and the manner of its quickening and feeding, and its growth, and what interval there is between one stage of growth and another, and what thing drives it forth from the body of the mother, and for what reason it sometimes emerges from the belly of its mother before the due time.

As an O.B. doctor of thirty years, and having delivered 4,000 babies, I can assure you life begins at conception.

A newborn already has nine months of experience when she is born.

A human being is nothing but a story with skin around it.

we are nothing more than the sum of our memories and experiences

But the ear, let us not forget, starts operating on the forty-fifth day of the pregnancy of a woman. Seven and a half months advance over the eye...(but) what do we do in our society, in our civilisation, to continue this process?

We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.

I remember clearly that when I was little it was explained to me [that] the way that babies were made was that God put the baby into some lady's stomach, right? And, at some point, I learned how it really happened, and really that was the beginning of the end of my belief in God. Up until that point, it had always been a really weird act of intervention on God's part.

I like to think of myself less like 'an adult' and more like a 'former fetus.'