Margot Lee Shetterly Quotes

#1. She always kept up the questioning until she received a satisfactory answer. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#2. Virginia, a state with one of the highest concentrations of scientific talent in the world, led the nation in denying education to its youth. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#3. There was virtually no aspect of twentieth-century defense technology that had not been touched by the hands and minds of female mathematicians. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#4. For Mary Jackson, life was a long process of raising one's expectations. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#5. As a child, however, I knew so many African Americans working in science, math, and engineering that I thought that's just what black folks did. My - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#6. But having the independence of mind and the strength of personality to defend your work in front of the most incisive aeronautical minds --- that is what got you noticed.... That's what marked you as someone who should move ahead. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#7. Because of the overwhelmingly white public face of the space program, the black engineers, scientists, and mathematicians who were deeply involved with the space race nevertheless lived in its shadows, even within the black community. Katherine - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#8. It was the engineer who determined what problems to investigate, designed the experiments, and defined the assignments for the mathematicians. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#9. West Virgina never left Katherine's heart, but Virginia was her destiny. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#10. Most of all, she went out of her way to provide them with the kinds of experiences that would expand their understanding of what was possible in their lives. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#11. Of course, while Katherine took the accolades in stride, she never took the work for granted. Not a morning dawned that she didn't wake up eager to get to the office. The passion that she had for her job was a gift, one that few people ever experienced. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#12. Their goal wasn't to stand out because of their differences; it was to fit in because of their talents. Like the men they worked for, and the men they sent hurtling off into the atmosphere, they were just doing their jobs. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#13. When seasoned by the subtleties of accident, harmony, favor, wisdom, and inevitability, luck takes on the cast of serendipity. Serendipity happens when a well-trained mind looking for one things encounters something else: the unexpected. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#14. No longer just "a dull bunch of grey buildings with grey people who worked with slide rules and wrote long equations on blackboards," NASA, the public now believed, was all that stood between them and a Red sky. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#15. I changed what I could, and what I couldn't, I endured. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#16. Many times, when children enter school they shun mathematics and science during the years when they should be learning the basics. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#17. That so many of them were African American, many of them my grandmother's age, struck me as simply a part of the natural order of things: growing up in Hampton, the face of science was brown like mine. My - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#18. So many ways to screw the pooch, and just one staggeringly complex, scrupulously modeled, endlessly rehearsed, indefatigably tested way to succeed. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#19. Eastman Jacob's legendary attempt to launch a car attached to a glider plane using Hampton's Tony Chesapeake Avenue as a runway only confirmed the Hamptonian's feelings that the Good Lord didn't always see fit to give book sense and common sense to the same individual. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#20. Insatiably curious about the world. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#21. She seemed to absorb the short-term oscillations of life without being dislodged by them, as though she were actually standing back observing that both travail and elation were merely part of a much larger, much smoother curve. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#22. the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Langley Research Center. I rode shotgun in our 1970s Pontiac, - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#23. At fifty years old and many years into her second career, she reinvented herself as a computer programmer. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#24. Is the kind of America I know worth defending? - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#25. Katherine Johnson knew: once you took the first step, anything was possible. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#26. Their path to advancement might look less like a straight line and more like some of the pressure distributions and orbits they plotted, but they were determined to take a seat at the table. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#27. Or maybe it was her father's pragmatic dictum -- "You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you"-- that disposed her to see the hardships of her life as a fate shared by everyone, her good fortunes as an unearned blessing. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#28. Their dark skin, their gender, their economic status--none of those were acceptable excuses for not giving the fullest rein to their imaginations and ambitions. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#29. she knew, the most important battles for dignity, pride, and progress were fought with the simplest of actions. It - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#30. black people frequently disqualified themselves even without the WHITES ONLY sign in view - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#31. Expertise in a subfield was the key to a successful career as an engineer, and expertise was becoming a necessity for the mathematicians and computers as well. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#32. For twelve school years, every morning, she had turned left out the front door to get to work. Now the taxi turned right, spiriting her off in the opposite direction. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#33. Future generations would take the advances for granted - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#34. War, technology, and social progress; it seemed that the second two always came with the first. The NACA's work - more intense and - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#35. ...internalized the Negro theorem of needing to be twice as good to get half as far. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#36. They turned their desks into a trigonometric war room, poring over equations scrawling ideas on blackboards, evaluating their work, erasing it, starting over. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#37. Not even Pearl Young, the NACA's first female engineer and the founder of the agency's rigorous editorial review process, left behind research with her name on it. From - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#38. Women, on the other hand, had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#39. Like craftsmen in a medieval guild, NASA engineers hoped that one day their children would decide to take up the mantle of the profession they held so dear. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#40. Now, at just thirty-eight years old, she found herself a widow and a mother, but also a professional still in the early days of realizing her long-held dream. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#41. a lifetime of stories - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#42. each of us should be allowed to rise as far as our talent and hard work can take us. The - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#43. There were those within NASA who believed, and would continue to believe for decades into the future, that the government's decision to put all its chips on a short-term strategy to beat the Soviets came at the cost of the opportunity to turn humans into a truly spacefaring species. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#44. The Byrd cronies retaliated by diverting taxpayer money to fund whites-only "segregation academies," private schools founded to circumvent integrated public schools. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#45. Why would a black or brown nation stake its future on America's model of democracy when within its own borders the United States enforced discrimination and savagery against people who looked just like them? The - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#46. Surely she had never traveled a greater emotional distance - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#47. In 1951, Air Scoop published a long list of organizations that the government had labeled totalitarian, Communist, or subversive, the clear message that affiliation with any of them might jeopardize one's job. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#48. She has been standing in the future for years, waiting for the rest of us to catch up. But - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#49. Sometimes, she knew, the most important battles for dignity, pride, and progress were fought with the simplest of actions. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly

#50. At the beginning of a decade when everything was beginning to seem possible, nothing seemed impossible. - Author: Margot Lee Shetterly