"Tommy, don’t you go fightin’ ’em alone. They’ll hunt you down like a coyote. Tommy, I got to thinkin’ an’ dreamin’ an’ wonderin’. They say there’s a hun’erd thousand of us shoved out. If we was all mad the same way, Tommy – they wouldn’t hunt nobody down – "
– John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 8. Ma Joad and Tom talk about doing something about the bank’s repossession of their land. She urges him not to go fighting them alone, but to fight together with all the other evicted tenant farming families. Here she emphasizes the power of unity and acting together as a community to resist injustice, very important themes in the novel.