
“Nobody's going to win all the time. On the highway of life you can't always be in the fast lane.”
Source: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
“Nobody's going to win all the time. On the highway of life you can't always be in the fast lane.”
Source: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Source: How to Win Friends and Influence People
“You can't win, you can't break even, and you can't get out of the fucking game.”
Interview with Gary K. Wolfe (28 July 1987), quoted in Harlan Ellison : The Edge of Forever (2002), by Ellen Weil and Gary K. Wolfe
Borrowing a common scientific joke expressing the laws of thermodynamics.
“You can't win with a losing hand”
Song lyrics, The Essential Bob Dylan (2000), Things Have Changed (recorded 1999)
On The Late Show with David Letterman (1994)
“1. You can't win. 2. You can't break even. 3. You can't even get out of the game.”
Several publications attribute the quote to Ginsberg, probably the first one is The Coevolution Quarterly in 1975 [Google books https://books.google.it/books?id=MylJAQAAIAAJ&q=%22ginsberg%27s+theorem%22&dq=%22ginsberg%27s+theorem%22&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y], but there's is no evidence whatsoever that he ever pronounced it. A more detailed analysis can be found in this post https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/you_cant_win_you_cant_break_even/
Misattributed, Ginsberg's theorem
“If you can't win, make sure you don't lose.”
In They said It: Johan Cruyff ( FIFA.com, 25 April 2014 http://www.fifa.com/news/y=2014/m=4/news=they-said-it-johan-cruyff-2323958.html).
“Sometimes you have to accept you can't win all the time.”
2010s, 2016, January, Speech at Liberty University (18 January 2016)
As quoted in Defy the darkness: A Tale of Courage in the Shadow of Mengele (2000) by Joe Rosenblum and David Kohn, p. 193