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Daily Inspiration Quote by Al Lewis

"I've been in the struggle over seventy years - it doesn't bother me I may not win"

About this Quote

There is a particular swagger in admitting you might lose and refusing to be embarrassed by it. Coming from Al Lewis - best known to many as Grandpa Munster, but also a lifelong leftist organizer and perennial candidate - the line reads like a distillation of the old-timer activist mindset: politics as a long relay race, not a personal brand exercise. The flex isn't victory. It's stamina.

The intent is partly defensive, partly liberating. Lewis is inoculating himself against the most common insult hurled at radicals and movement people: that if you don't rack up clear wins, your life has been wasted. He preempts that accounting. By framing struggle as a decades-long commitment, he shifts the metric from outcome to participation, from the scoreboard to the spine. It's also a subtle rebuke to spectators who demand quick results from messy systems, then use disappointment as an excuse to disengage.

The subtext carries an actor's timing: a dry, almost comic deadpan that makes the line land without self-pity. "It doesn't bother me" is doing heavy work. It's not indifference; it's emotional discipline, a refusal to let the possibility of defeat dictate whether the fight is worth showing up for.

Context matters because Lewis belonged to a generation shaped by labor battles, anti-fascism, McCarthyism, civil rights - eras where "winning" was rarely clean and often arrived decades later, if at all. The quote isn't romantic. It's pragmatic: history moves slow, and serious people keep pushing anyway.

Quote Details

TopicPerseverance
SourceHelp us find the source
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Lewis, Al. (2026, January 16). I've been in the struggle over seventy years - it doesn't bother me I may not win. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ive-been-in-the-struggle-over-seventy-years-it-138806/

Chicago Style
Lewis, Al. "I've been in the struggle over seventy years - it doesn't bother me I may not win." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ive-been-in-the-struggle-over-seventy-years-it-138806/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I've been in the struggle over seventy years - it doesn't bother me I may not win." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/ive-been-in-the-struggle-over-seventy-years-it-138806/. Accessed 4 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Al Lewis (April 30, 1910 - February 3, 2006) was a Actor from USA.

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