The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

by Mark Twain

and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five,

hear? I’ll learn people to bring up a boy to put on airs over his own father and let on to be better’n what HE is. You lemme catch you fooling around that school again, you hear? Your mother couldn’t read, and she couldn’t write, nuther, before she died. None of the family couldn’t before THEY died. I can’t; and here you’re a-swelling yourself up like this. I ain’t the man to stand it—you hear? Say, lemme hear you read.”

Well, he was right; he was most always right; he had an uncommon level head for a nigger.

I see it warn’t no use wasting words—you can’t learn a nigger to argue. So I quit.

Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger, which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm.

The time that the book was written in is so apparent here. The "nigger" too is a human being, but Huck is more concerned about the slave owner losing his property than with thinking that Jim might want claim over his own kids

what’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn’t answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn’t bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.

trouble. If they wanted us to call them kings and dukes, I hadn’t no objections, ’long as it would keep peace in the family;

him. If I never learnt nothing else out of pap, I learnt that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way.

The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.

I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their’n. It don’t seem natural, but I reckon it’s so.