Daily Inspiration Quote by P. J. O'Rourke

P. J. O'Rourke’s line works like a barbed one-liner at a roast: it pretends to diagnose an ideology, then swerves into body horror. “Brings out warts” is deliberately low, physical, and humiliating. He’s not arguing policy; he’s making Marxism feel unattractive. By choosing a symptom associated with contagion and embarrassment, O’Rourke frames the system as something you “catch,” not something you choose after sober reflection. That’s a classic satirist’s move: downgrade a grand theory of history into an itchy skin condition.

The second half tightens the trap. “The only kind of growth this economic system encourages” hijacks Marxism’s own vocabulary. Growth is the term modern economies worship, and Marxists are often accused of being anti-growth, or at least suspicious of capitalist growth’s human cost. O’Rourke flips the charge into a pun: under Marxism, the only growth is pathological. The joke lands because it’s structurally neat: a medical image that doubles as an economic critique, with “only” doing the heavy lifting of absolutism.

Subtextually, he’s also smuggling in a Cold War-era cultural reflex: Marxism as not merely wrong, but deforming - something that makes people and societies uglier, poorer, smaller. Context matters: O’Rourke built a brand on libertarian skepticism and comic contempt for bureaucratic certainty. The intent isn’t to persuade a Marxist; it’s to give the anti-Marxist reader a satisfying, memorable insult that feels like an argument. Satire here is a shorthand for confidence: if you can laugh at it, you don’t have to fear it.