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Witty One-Liners Quote by Terry Brennan

"If you're old and you lose, they say you're outmoded. If you're young and you lose, they say you're green. So don't lose"

About this Quote

Competition doesn not just grade your performance; it grades your story. Terry Brennan's line is a stripped-down survival manual for anyone operating under a scoreboard culture where narratives calcify instantly. Lose when you're older and the verdict is obituary-adjacent: "outmoded" implies your ideas, instincts, even your right to occupy space have expired. Lose when you're young and the label is "green", a softer word that still quarantines you as not-yet-serious, someone whose mistakes are evidence of immaturity rather than circumstance. Either way, the loss is made to mean more than it is.

The cleverness is in how Brennan frames age as a rigged prism. Same outcome, different prejudice. That little switch exposes how institutions (sports teams, workplaces, politics, entertainment) protect themselves from ambiguity by stapling failure to identity. It is not about the game; it is about who gets to be credible afterward. The subtext is almost brutally pragmatic: you cannot control the chatter, but you can control the one datum that shuts it up.

"So don't lose" lands as both joke and threat. On the surface it's a coach's blunt pep talk, the kind meant to snap someone out of overthinking. Underneath, it's an indictment of a culture that offers no graceful way to fail. When the only acceptable biography is winning, you start playing not just to succeed, but to avoid being reduced to a category.

Quote Details

TopicWitty One-Liners
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Brennan, Terry. (2026, January 15). If you're old and you lose, they say you're outmoded. If you're young and you lose, they say you're green. So don't lose. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-youre-old-and-you-lose-they-say-youre-outmoded-163108/

Chicago Style
Brennan, Terry. "If you're old and you lose, they say you're outmoded. If you're young and you lose, they say you're green. So don't lose." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-youre-old-and-you-lose-they-say-youre-outmoded-163108/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"If you're old and you lose, they say you're outmoded. If you're young and you lose, they say you're green. So don't lose." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-youre-old-and-you-lose-they-say-youre-outmoded-163108/. Accessed 25 Feb. 2026.

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Terry Brennan: Age, Blame, and the Pressure to Win
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Terry Brennan is a notable figure.

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