Uncle Tom Quotes

Harriet Beecher Stowe was thirty-nine when she began Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She had given birth to seven children and seen one die. She wrote her book to be serialized in an abolitionist newspaper. Much of it she composed on the kitchen table in between the cooking, mending, tending to her house.

Of course, in a novel, people’s hearts break, and they die and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.

So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!

If you read the story of slavery and see the part that the Uncle Tom played in the plantation, and then you see how the white man today has changed his tactics, but he still occupies the same position, in that same context you find Uncle Tom. He has changed his tactics but he still occupies the same position.

Jazz is an Uncle Tom word. They should stop using that word for selling. I told George Wein the other day that he should stop using it.

What I’m worrying about is what Tom is going to say when he starts talking.” “Uncle Tom?” “I wish there was something else you could call him except ‘Uncle Tom,’ ” Aunt Dahlia said a little testily. “Every time you do it, I expect to see him turn black and start playing the banjo.

For, so inconsistent is human nature, especially in the ideal, that not to undertake a thing at all seems better than to undertake and come short.

I make no manner of doubt that you threw a very diamond of truth at me, though you see it hit me so directly in the face that it wasn’t exactly appreciated, at first.

I don’t use those terms [like Uncle Tom], and I would never speak in that kind of language.

The same thing that Uncle Tom did on the plantation before [Abe] Lincoln issued the so-called Emancipation Proclamation.I have no thinking on the matter. But he’s teaching the black people to suffer peacefully, patiently, until the white man makes up his mind that you’re a human being the same as he.

In other words, science tells us that Adam and Eve are fictions. That Saint Paul or Uncle Tom Cobley and all thought otherwise is irrelevant. They were wrong.

Among liberals and Democrats, there is this notion that the poor – especially the black poor – can do no wrong. If you criticize any poor and black person who displays inappropriate, boorish or egregiously bad conduct, you’ll be dismissed as a racist if you’re not black. And as an Uncle Tom or sellout if you are.

My current novel, Pallas, is all about that culture war – in fact it’s been called the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the Sagebrush Rebellion – and yet what I hear all too often from libertarians is that they don’t read fiction.

You have the upper class Negroes who are the modern day Uncle Toms or the 20th century Uncle Toms. They don’t wear a handkerchief anymore. They wear top hats. They’re called Doctor, they’re called – Reverend, but they’re still – they play the same role today that Uncle Tom played on the plantation.

If I could write a story that would do for the Indian one-hundredth part what ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ did for the Negro, I would be thankful the rest of my life.

I don’t like to be described as a Southern writer. The danger is, if you’re described as a Southern writer, you might be thought of as someone who writes about a picturesque local scene like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gone With the Wind, something like that.

I’m not an Uncle Tom. . .. I’m going to be here for 40 years. For those who don’t like it, get over it.

IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Tom’s Cabin was passing through its serial stage, and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction.

I did not write it (Uncle Tom’s Cabin). God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.

What’s your hurry?” Because now is the only time there ever is to do a thing in,” said Miss Ophelia.

I Hated Duke. I Felt Like They Only Recruited Black Players That Were Uncle Toms.

I don’t know anything about politics. Like, zero. Nothing.

I am one of the sort that lives by throwing stones at other people’s glass houses, but I never mean to put up one for them to stone.

For me, Duke was personal. I hated Duke and I hated everything I felt Duke stood for. Schools like Duke didn’t recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited players who were Uncle Toms.

Anyone can see that to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the knee in the kitchen, with constant calls to cooking and other details of housework to punctuate the paragraphs, was a more difficult achievement than to write it at leisure in a quiet room.

They said that I had sold out and (am an) Uncle Tom. And I said well, they deserve to have that view. But I have my thoughts. And I think they’re race-hustling poverty pimps.

[Reviewing a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin] The dogs were poorly supported by the cast.

The longest way must have its close – the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning.

At this point I feel like I could go out and accomplish anything. I’d just love to see Will Smith’s face if he found out I, Z-Braff, have the number one rap album in the country. That’d show that no-talent uncle tom.

Harriet Beecher Stowe thought Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written through her by Another Hand, so little did she know what was going to happen from moment to moment in the book. She herself was amazed at what she was writing.

A handful of works in history have had a direct impact on social policy: one or two works of Dickens, some of Zola, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and, in modern drama, Larry Kramer’s ‘The Normal Heart.’

Religion! Is what you hear at church religion? Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion?

There are in this world blessed souls, whose sorrows all spring up into joys for others; whose earthly hopes, laid in the grave with many tears, are the seed from which spring healing flowers and balm for the desolate and the distressed.