War & Peace Quote by William McFee

McFee’s line has the briny stoicism of someone who’s seen plans buckle under weather, war, and bad luck. “If fate means you to lose” isn’t a melodramatic shrug; it’s a clear-eyed admission that outcomes aren’t fully negotiable. The sentence refuses the modern fantasy that grit guarantees victory. Instead, it relocates dignity from the scoreboard to the posture you take while the world does what it will.

The sly trick is in the pronouns and the pivot. Fate becomes “him” - not an abstract force but an opponent you can face, size up, even irritate. That personification matters: you can’t bargain with fate, but you can still choose your stance toward it. “Give him a good fight anyhow” makes resistance an ethical style, not a strategic bet. The “anyhow” is the pressure point: it drains the act of its transactional logic. Fight isn’t a means to win; it’s a way to refuse humiliation, to keep your agency intact even when the ending is written in someone else’s hand.

Contextually, McFee wrote in an era shadowed by industrial danger and world war, when “fate” often arrived as machinery, bureaucracy, or artillery rather than poetic destiny. His intent reads less like inspiration-poster uplift and more like working-class metaphysics: you may not control the verdict, but you can control whether you go quietly. The subtext is almost defiant: if you can’t change the result, at least change what it costs them to take it.