Unconditional surrender

“ There are also large elements which have never accepted the unconditional surrender and which never will. At any moment in this land of instability, the fires which have been kindled by German bad faith and duplicity may break into a conflagration. ”

“ Harrison remarked. “They mean to invest us—to storm us, if necessary. Their force is six times that of ours. But we must repulse them. To surrender means to lose all for which we have planned and fought—and to court death at the hands of the savages. ”

“ And as the lesser surrendereth himself to the greater that he may have delight and power over the least of all, so doth even the greatest surrender himself, and staketh—life, for the sake of power.
It is the surrender of the greatest to run risk and danger, and play dice for death. ”

“ He will always tell you that he is pleased to surrender, that it is an end he has been longing and praying for for months, and yet until the actual moment which necessitates surrender he will strain every nerve to avoid capture, will suffer every privation and hardship; endure hunger, thirst, disease, and sickness, rather than walk the few miles which separate him from the British outposts. ”

“ You serve what you despise, you lie in every gesture, word, and thought, you surrender, become nothing.... What does it profit us all, if we all surrender? For the sake of whom, or what? To satisfy blind instincts, or rogues? ”

“ I began, "I want to ask you a strange question—how far are you prepared to make a martyr of yourself for the good of the cause?" He looked a little surprised, but said quietly, "I think you should know that by this time". "No." I said, "candidly I do not." "Well," said he, his face kindling, "it is a matter with me of complete surrender. I am nothing, I am willing to die at any time, or to do anything for the cause". ”

“ It is pleasant to think of one’s first delicious surrender to fatigue after a long day’s haul on a hot road. That surrender, in all one’s joints, with all one’s driven will, is the ecstasy that even the Puritan allowed himself. ”

“ I spread out before you the starvation, the cruelty, the ghastliness, the woes, the terror, the anguish, the perdition of this evil, and then ask, Are you ready, fully and forever, to surrender our churches, our homes, our civilization, our glorious Christianity? One or the other must surrender. It can be no "drawn battle." ”

“ The possibility of a peace shameful to justice and disastrous to civilization was carefully ignored. The truth that death is better than a surrender of all that makes life morally worth the living, was never spoken. ”

“ So I come to you all with this message. No matter what your past, no matter how much of your life may have ebbed away, no matter how deeply rooted and obstinate may be your habits of evil, no matter how often you may have tried to mend yourself and have failed, it is possible by one swift act of surrender to break the chains and go free. ”

“ On the one hand, surrender carried to a certain point is extremely mischievous and to a further point fatal; and on the other hand, much of the happiness each enjoys is self-generated and can neither be given nor received. ”

“ Every one felt this. No one therefore dreamed of a surrender. As the wounded men were carried below, their departing looks were directed frowningly on the enemy,—and the last words of the dying were to conjure their messmates never to give up.
“Never flinch, my hearties,” ejaculated the gunner, as one of his crew was struck by a splinter; and had to be carried below. “Give it to ’em, for villains and tyrants as they are. Hah! ”

“ Of what use is it to us, who are now deprived of every hope of peace, to have assisted you with our tears in obtaining victory; when, although it lay within your power to release us from our prison-house, you surrender us anew into the hands of our oppressors? ”

“ The pitiful cries of the aged, the women and the children, instead of softening the hearts of the soldiers,—maddened with rage, like their leaders,—only served to guide them in the pursuit of the fugitives, and to indicate the points against which to direct their fury. Voluntary surrender did not exempt the men from slaughter, nor the women from brutal outrages at which nature revolts. ”

“ To run through this old Book and call the names is to bring to mind the men who have gone through just such testings and temptings; some with splendid victory, and some with shameful defeat.
So it comes to pass that surrender is not simply the initial act into this life of power. It must become the continuous habit. There must be a habitual living up to the act. Surrender comes to be an attitude of the will affecting every act and event of life. And by and by the instinctive measuring of everything by its relation to Jesus comes to be the involuntary habit of the life. ”

“ The voluntary surrenderee risks being shot by some exasperated officer or comrade on his own side; he risks court-martial for treason if his surrender is wilful and his side wins the war; he may run into a trigger-happy enemy who will shoot him; he may fail to make himself understood to the enemy. ”

“ As to those men whom you make believe to surrender I neither accept them nor do I regard them as surrendered, nor do I hinder them from returning to their countrymen, who are bound by a convention, the violation of which brings down the wrath of all the gods whose majesty is being trifled with. True, Spurius Postumius has just struck the herald fetial with his knee, then wage war! ”

“ To use surrender as a weapon is the very worst spirit of the East. But certainly there is no force so hard to fight as the force which it is easy to conquer; the force that always yields and then returns. ”

“ Every man or every power whose action consists solely in surrender can only finish by self-annihilation. Everything that lives resists; that which does not resist allows itself to be cut up piecemeal" (Aurore, August 15, 1905) . ”

“ At any instant we may be called upon to surrender, not only all the materials of enjoyment which He has bestowed upon us, but life itself, which is equally His gift; and whenever He does so call upon us we shall have neither the right nor the power to resist. "Shall He not do what He will with His own?" ”

“ Antonyms: SURRENDER. Synonyms:
To surrender is to give up upon compulsion, as to an enemy in war, hence to give up to any person, passion, influence, or power. To yield is to give place or give way under pressure, and hence under compulsion. Yield implies more softness or concession than surrender; the most determined men may surrender to overwhelming force; when one yields, his spirit is at least somewhat subdued. ”

“ The former, enveloped in pious vanity and lulled into fancied security by the delusive hope that their souls are already "saved," sit down in the very midst of the fight, take off their armor and lay aside their weapons, as complacently as if the battle was already won; while the others, like the inmates of a beleaguered city, conscious of weakness and certain of eventual defeat, but wilfully preferring death and dishonor to the merciful alternative of an honorable surrender, entrench themselves behind the weak walls of arrogance and pride, and await the onslaught of the all-conquering foe. ”

“ What more could a man do than that? Already his heart was crying out for his daughter—the cry of broken strings which never knew their strength until they broke. But to show any emotion, or to express regret for anything he had done, meant surrender, and if there was one thing John Harris could not do it was surrender. ”

“ Yet it is not the self-tormenting strife of introspective and self-conscious aspiration, but rather an unrelaxed, diligent intention, a steady acquiescence, a simple and loyal surrender to the great currents of life, a holding on to results achieved in your best moments, that shall do it for you: a surrender not limp but deliberate, a trustful self-donation, a "living faith." ”

“ A man may surrender his life as a sacrifice to a cause he deems greater than self but it is nevertheless a supreme sacrifice. A soldier accepts the fatal thrust of the bayonet and a criminal mounts the scaffold or sits in the death chair because he cannot help it. ”

“ If fortune still lays siege to me there with all her troops, and if, to reduce me to surrender, she piles up the sorrows of our human lot, the remembrance of my old miseries and the dread of evils yet to come, then, at lost, hemmed in on all sides, seized with terror at these heaped-up calamities, I bemoan my wretched fate, and feel rising in my very soul this bitter disdain of life. Picture to yourself some one beset with countless enemies, with no hope of escape or of pity, with no comfort anywhere, with every one and everything against him ”

“ That is total surrender — total helplessness. It can't be brought about through any effort or volition of yours. If you want to surrender to something, it's only to get something. That's why I use the words 'a state of total surrender'. It's a state of surrender where all effort has come to an end, where all movement in the direction of getting something has come to an end. All wanting, be it this wanting or that wanting, is totally absent. ”

“ And such surrender has consequences that lie nearer than those which make themselves manifest in old age. Your next step is into middle life; and it is here where the question is finally decided whether it is, or is not, well for us that we are here at all. ”

“ By the surrender of self all difficulties are overcome, and there is no error in the universe but the fire of inward sacrifice will burn it up like chaff; no problem, however great, but will disappear like a shadow under the searching light of self-abnegation. ”

“ The enemy surrounds us in overwhelming and ever-increasing numbers. Then we must die, and have only to choose such method of death as may best serve our country. Shall we surrender, and be deliberately shot? Shall we try to cut our way out through the Mexican ranks, and be butchered before we can kill twenty of our adversaries? I am opposed to either plan, but leave every man of you to his own decision. Should any one choose to surrender, or attempt to escape, he is at liberty to do so. ”

“ It may be urged, however, that an essential element is lacking in all this discussion—the sobering possibility that in war the supreme surrender of life itself may be required. Death for one’s country is indeed glorious. ”

“ His aspect was to me not so much that of a man desperately ill, as mortally weary—a vanquished man. That act of destruction affected me profoundly by its air of surrender. Not before death, however. To a man of such strong faith death could not have been an enemy. ”

“ And my sad soul, once more within love’s station,
As thy fair form doth twine my heart around!”
Here at last seems the surrender. Now that her “fair form doth twine” around his heart, the very suddenness of victory inspires even in its joy a dubious misgiving; so hard won has it been, that all the past anxiety and pain robs it of half the exquisite realization the event should bring. ”

“ Nevertheless, a historian will probably regard the establishment and continuance of this blockade of the enemy lands after their surrender as one of those many acts of almost incredible inhumanity which have made the recent Great War conspicuous in the annals of mankind and shaken thoughtful men's faith in the reality of modern civilization. ”

“ Then, in a few months, came the news of the surrender, bringing with it a species of paralysis or stupefaction from which the people were long in recovering—so long, indeed, that some of them died in despair, while others lingered on the stage, watching, with dim eyes and trembling limbs, half-hopefully and half-fretfully, the representatives of a new generation trying to build up the waste places. ”

“ This may be fair enough in cases where large numbers surrender to a few, or where they lay down their arms when with courage and determination they might have cut their way through the enemy; but in cases where further resistance would be hopeless, in my mind men are justified in surrendering. However, I can only obey the orders I have received, and tomorrow must send you and your men to the mines. ”

“ It is much grander to shout ‘Death sooner than surrender!’ I shouted that lustily as long as there was any hope—now, I think it my duty as a statesman, and public functionary, to say, ‘There are worse things than death—let us try and avoid them by making terms.’ I say that to you—I do not say so on the streets—the people would tear me to pieces, and with their sources of information they would be right in doing so. ”

“ They believed that to surrender was only to spare their enemies, who, as soon as the prisoners could be disarmed, would butcher them in cold blood, paying no recompense in the death of any of their own number. ”

“ If we can get troops onto the surface first, we'll be able to scout out their important installations in short order, and issue them a surrender ultimatum with teeth in it. They'll take it. The only other course is the sort of slow, mutual suicide we've got now. ”

“ And more tears; and more entreaties; and pitiable shows of rebellion, quickly subdued; and petty resistances; and tortured turnings to and fro over the road; and at last surrender.
At last surrender!
Death even, had death been his condition, she would have accepted sooner than this dire alternative. Only one idea possessed her now—that the Spawer should never know the presumption of her love.
But the letter! Till he got that ... he would not go at all. The longer its restitution was delayed, the longer must she endure her agony. ”

“ They give up nothing that it is not gain to lose, nothing that they are not better without, but they have to surrender much in which other people find great enjoyment, and which their weaker selves would delight in too. Are you ready, my brother, for that? 'Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.' The old days of heroism and martyrdom are done with, as far as we are concerned, whatever may lie in the future. But do we make willingly and gladly the surrenders and the self-abnegations that are demanded by our loyalty to our Master? ”

“ And so what Jesus means here is simply this--surrender. Bend your head down, bend down your neck, even though it's a bit stiff going your own way, and fit it into this yoke of mine. Surrender to Me as your Master.
And somebody says, "I don't like that. 'Surrender!' that sounds like force. I thought salvation was free." Will you please remember that the principle of surrender is a law of all life. It is the law of military life, inside the army. Every man there has surrendered to the officers above him. ”