Sometimes it's better to stop fighting it and hold up your hands — perhaps with an accompanying shrug of the shoulders and a submissive, palms-out gesture of surrender — and usher in the dawn of creeping middle age with a mature degree of acceptance and inevitability.
Government officials said clashes in the city on Saturday had been put down within half an hour, and Col Gaddafi congratulated his supporters for repelling rebel "rats", while his son, Saif al-Islam, ruled out any possibility of surrender.
During the 51-day occupation and siege that followed, two dozen Davidians and their children came out of Mount Carmel to surrender, but most remained inside, feeling like leaving would be like jumping ship on Noah's Ark.
When they turned up the bag, my homies and I all young, brown men instinctively held our hands out to our sides, palms out, as a show of surrender. .
It was especially glaring Sunday night when the defense wasted the backup quarterback Dennis Dixon's out-of-nowhere effort and surrendered a fourth-quarter lead with a chance to steal an entirely unexpected victory without Roethlisberger.
Knowing that defeat was imminent, Hitler committed suicide, leaving Karl Dönitz to carry out the surrender of the Nazis.
Mr. Kussa played a leading role last fall with American and British intelligence teams to work out a surrender of Libya's illicit weapons programs.
It was in the negotiation of apartheid's end that Mandela's greatness found its fullest expression, and that greatness is in no way diminished by remembering that the last leader of South Africa's apartheid-era government, F. W. de Klerk, with whom he hashed out the terms of surrender, rightly shared the Nobel Peace Prize with him.
Though acknowledging the risk, some of those who go guardless said a change would amount to a sort of surrender, carried out in the absence of any tangible threat.
On 12 September, Middleton sent a letter to Ramcke offering him an opportunity to stop the bloodshed, and to surrender the city in a humane and reasonable way, with terms of surrender spelled out in the letter.
