UNVERIFIED
“A winner is a loser who tried one more time.”
- Commonly attributed to: George M. Moore Jr. — a name that appears with the quote and almost nowhere else
- Earliest documented appearance: None located. No book, speech, article, newspaper or periodical printing has been traced. The oldest findable instances are quote-aggregation entries and social posts, none of which cite a source.
- Who George M. Moore Jr. was: Unestablished. No published work, biography or obituary has been connected to the attribution. Searches surface an unrelated George Moore, a three-cushion billiards champion, with no link to the line.
- Common variant: “A winner is just a loser who tried one more time.”
- Confidence: Low · Last verified: October 2026
The verdict: This quote has a confident, specific attribution and no provenance whatsoever — not a weak source, but no source. A middle initial and a suffix make “George M. Moore Jr.” read like the product of a citation, which is probably why it has never been questioned. I could not establish that such a person said it, wrote it, or existed.
Nothing above rests on a primary source, because none was found; the finding here is the absence itself. How I verify quotes →
“A winner is a loser who tried one more time.”
Most of the quotes in this archive are misattributed, which means there is a real author somewhere and a famous name sitting in their place. This one is different and in some ways more instructive: there is no author to find at all, and yet the attribution is unusually precise.
What the Search Turns Up
The line circulates with a name attached: George M. Moore Jr. It appears that way on quote sites, in social posts, on graphics, and in several languages. What does not appear anywhere is a source — no book, no speech, no sermon, no newspaper column, no dated periodical of any kind.
Nor is there a George M. Moore Jr. The searches return a George Moore who was a three-cushion billiards champion, with nothing connecting him to motivational writing, and otherwise nothing: no biography, no bibliography, no obituary, no institutional affiliation. The name exists in the world attached to this sentence and essentially to nothing else.
That is a different situation from an unverified quote with a thin source. A thin source can be checked and found wanting. Here there is nothing to check.
Why the Attribution Is So Sticky
The specificity is the trick, and it is worth understanding because the same pattern turns up elsewhere.
- A middle initial reads as research. “George Moore” invites a question. “George M. Moore Jr.” looks like it came off a title page.
- The suffix implies a record. Juniors have fathers, families, documents. The name sounds like it was copied from somewhere rather than guessed.
- Obscurity protects it. If the line were credited to Churchill or Edison, someone who knows the material would object. Nobody is defending the bibliography of George M. Moore Jr., because there isn’t one.
We have the same dynamic on file for a saying credited to an unfindable “Maria Robinson”. An unverifiable name is more durable than a wrong famous one.
The Idea Is Genuinely Old
None of this makes the sentiment novel, and that is part of why it slid into circulation unexamined. The thought — that the difference between winning and losing is one additional attempt — is one of the most heavily restated ideas in the motivational canon. The Japanese proverb nana korobi ya oki, “fall seven times, rise eight,” makes the same claim. So does “the expert at anything was once a beginner”, by a different route.
A line this familiar does not trigger anyone’s suspicion, because it does not feel like new information. It feels like something already known, being restated. That is exactly the condition under which nobody asks for a citation.
How to Quote It
Treat it as anonymous. If you want to keep the convention, “attributed to George M. Moore Jr.” is defensible as long as the word attributed stays in. What is not defensible is presenting the name as the author, which is what every version currently in circulation does.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who said “a winner is a loser who tried one more time”?
No verifiable author. The line is universally credited to George M. Moore Jr., but no book, speech, article or dated printing supporting that has been located, and no identifiable person of that name has been connected to it.
Who was George M. Moore Jr.?
Unknown. No published work, biography or obituary has been linked to the attribution. A George Moore who was a billiards champion turns up in searches but has no connection to the quote.
Is the quote fake?
The sentence circulates widely and is real in that sense — what is unsupported is the author. It is best treated as an anonymous motivational saying rather than a quotation from a specific person.
About This Article
Written by Margaret Voss. Margaret Voss is an obsessive quote hunter who has spent over 15 years chasing down primary sources and original attributions purely because she can't stand a misattributed quote. She's built an extensive personal archive of manuscripts, letters, speeches, and historical documents along the way, and has gotten pretty good at spotting quotes that have been misattributed for decades. No formal training — just fifteen years of stubborn fact-checking and a refusal to let "probably said by Einstein" slide. More about this site.
Verify this against a primary source
Specifics change, and your situation may differ from the one described here. These are the authorities worth checking directly:
- Quote Investigator — traced attributions and earliest known citations
- Wikiquote — sourced and disputed-attribution listings
- Internet Archive — scans of the original printed sources