Margot Lee Shetterly

“...internalized the Negro theorem of needing to be twice as good to get half as far.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

“black people frequently disqualified themselves even without the WHITES ONLY sign in view”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

“At the beginning of a decade when everything was beginning to seem possible, nothing seemed impossible.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

Every time you go to an airport and get on a plane, you are basically taking advantage of the work that was…

— Margot Lee Shetterly

“It was the engineer who determined what problems to investigate, designed the experiments, and defined the assignments for the mathematicians.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

“Like craftsmen in a medieval guild, NASA engineers hoped that one day their children would decide to take up the mantle of…

— Margot Lee Shetterly

For too long, history has imposed a binary condition on its black citizens: either nameless or renowned, menial or exceptional, passive recipients…

— Margot Lee Shetterly

“a lifetime of stories”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

“Insatiably curious about the world.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

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

— Margot Lee Shetterly

“Early in her career at Langley, Dorthy Lee was interviewed for the Daily Press, in all probability by Virginia Biggins, the female…

— Margot Lee Shetterly

“Get the girl to check the numbers,' said the astronaut. If she says the numbers are good, he told them, I'm ready…

— Margot Lee Shetterly

My dad worked with Mary Jackson very closely at one point. I knew Katherine Johnson as well. They were all part of…

— Margot Lee Shetterly

“War, technology, and social progress; it seemed that the second two always came with the first. The NACA’s work—more intense and”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

“The black female mathematicians who walked into Langley in 1943 would find themselves at the intersection of these great transformations, their sharp…

— Margot Lee Shetterly

“They wore their professional clothes like armor. They wielded their work like weapons, warding off the presumption of inferiority because they were…

— Margot Lee Shetterly

During World War II, hundreds of thousands of people actually - and among them many African-American - migrated to the Hampton Roads…

— Margot Lee Shetterly

“Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one thing encounters something else: the unexpected.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

“You can't leave the show," King told Nichols. "We are there because you are there." Black people have been imagined in the…

— Margot Lee Shetterly

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

— Margot Lee Shetterly

“But years and miles away from home could never attenuate the city's hold on my identity, and the more I explored places…

— Margot Lee Shetterly

“If Mary had applied for a job as janitor, the doors to the school would swing wide open. As a professional engineer-in-training…

— Margot Lee Shetterly

“Future generations would take the advances for granted”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

I want to keep telling stories of ordinary people.

— Margot Lee Shetterly

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

— Margot Lee Shetterly