“The male has a negative Midas Touch - everything he touches turns to shit.”

“It is the system, rather than individuals, that is the source of pollution and degradation. My prison-house environment is but another manifestation of the Midas-hand, whose cursed touch turns everything to the brutal service of Mammon.”

“Politics is shit; it corrupts everything it touches, and getting involved in it only leads to misery and dissatisfaction.”

“Everything government touches turns to crap.”

“Everything I touch seems destined to turn into something mean and farcical.”

“He had only to touch me to turn my tears into sighs and my anger to desire. How accomodating love is; it forgives everything.”

“Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches - he has made music sick.”

“If you touch one thing with deep awareness, you touch everything.”

“The legend of King Midas has been generally misunderstood. Most people think the curse that turned everything the old miser touched into gold, leaving him unable to eat or drink, was a lesson in the perils of avarice. But Midas’s true sin was his failure to understand monetary economics. What the gods were really telling him is that gold is just a metal. If it sometimes seems to be more, that is only because society has found it convenient to use gold as a medium of exchange—a bridge between other, truly desirable, objects. There are other possible mediums of exchange, and it is silly to imagine that this pretty, but only moderately useful, substance has some irreplaceable significance.”

“You will see that the only liar in the Midi, if there is one, is the sun; everything that he touches he exaggerates.”