Top 25 Margot Lee Shetterly Quotes

I knew a lot of black scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, and female mathematicians and engineers, women of all backgrounds. So this idea that anyone could be an engineer, a mathematician, or whatever, was something that I had grown up with and thought was really normal.

We want the big stories, of course, of the great men, but there’s as much drama and interest and lessons to be learned in actions that people like us take on a daily basis.

The success of ‘Hidden Figures’ proves that people are interested in, hungry for, stories about transcendent human experiences.

I feel like, in a lot of ways, ‘Hidden Figures’ is the book that I wrote and have been waiting to read since I learned to read.

There is so much talent among our young people; I hope the women in ‘Hidden Figures’ inspire them.

The Russians had got a real head-start into space; America was playing catch-up.

It has been very rare to see a black woman as a protagonist. And also as three-dimensional people – mathematicians, mothers, wives, complicated people, not perfect.

You need to decide that you’re going to use a story to enlighten and inspire people in the modern day.

You don’t get the good without the bad, but you really do have to see it all in order to make progress.

My dad worked at NASA his whole career; he’s a research scientist.

I’m not a scientist or a mathematician.

As much as I think it is necessary and desirable for white people to have an expanded view of the black American experience, it’s probably even more important for black people to have that expanded view.

You can’t change history. These things happened the way they did. What you can change is how you look at it and how you understand that it takes the good moments and it takes the difficult moments to move forward.

My dad worked with Mary Jackson very closely at one point. I knew Katherine Johnson as well. They were all part of this group of black engineers and scientists within this larger NASA community.

Without imagination, I don’t think there’s any progress.

I guess it’s inevitable that I would become somebody who would write about scientists.

Every time you go to an airport and get on a plane, you are basically taking advantage of the work that was done at Langley. Between World War I and World War II, they did just tremendous amount of fundamental research into basically making airplanes safer, making them more stable.

The black experience isn’t exclusively slavery/civil rights/Obama.

History happens as soon as I pick up my coffee cup – it happened 30 seconds ago. It’s history.

A lot of times, we talk about black people as if being black is all they are. They get up, go to work… and are as complex and interesting and variable as any other group of people. We don’t often capture that or write about it.

Our next-door neighbour taught physics at Hampton University. Our church abounded with mathematicians. Supersonics experts held leadership positions in my mother’s sorority, and electrical engineers sat on the board of my parents’ college alumni associations.

During World War II, hundreds of thousands of people actually – and among them many African-American – migrated to the Hampton Roads area because of the job boom that was happening. It was a place where you could get stable war jobs.

I want to keep telling stories of ordinary people.

For too long, history has imposed a binary condition on its black citizens: either nameless or renowned, menial or exceptional, passive recipients of the forces of history or superheroes who acquire mythic status not just because of their deeds but because of their scarcity.

I started to think of ‘Hidden Figures’ as the first part of a mid-century African-American trilogy.