I don't care to belong to any organization that accepts me as a member.

Groucho Marx’s line is best known from a 1949 letter he wrote when resigning from the Friars Club, a New York show-business fraternity. Marx had been involved with the club for years, but disputes and changing circumstances led him to quit; in his resignation he deployed this self-deprecating, paradoxical joke about the dubious value of any group willing to include him. The quip later took on a broader afterlife as a standalone aphorism, often invoked to satirize social clubs, institutions, and the human desire for status and belonging—especially when membership itself seems to cheapen the prestige being sought.

The humor turns on a mock-logical reversal: if a group accepts someone like the speaker, the group’s standards must be low, so membership cannot be desirable. Beneath the joke is a sharp comment on insecurity and status anxiety—how people may crave affiliation yet distrust the very institutions that confer it. Marx also punctures the aura of exclusivity that clubs and organizations trade on, suggesting that prestige is often a social illusion. The line’s enduring appeal lies in its compact expression of ambivalence about belonging: it can read as comic self-loathing, as a critique of elitism, or as a defense against rejection by preemptively rejecting the group.

1) "I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member." 2) "I wouldn’t belong to any club that would accept me as a member." 3) "I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member."