Top 50 Margot Lee Shetterly Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Katherine Johnson knew: once you took the first step, anything was possible.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

2. “Their goal wasn’t to stand out because of their differences; it was to fit in because of their talent.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

3. “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.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

4. “She has been standing in the future for years, waiting for the rest of us to catch up. But.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

5. “Women, on the other hand, had to wield their intellects like a scythe, hacking away against the stubborn underbrush of low expectations.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

6. “Sometimes, she knew, the most important battles for dignity, pride, and progress were fought with the simplest of actions.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

7. “I changed what I could, and what I couldn’t, I endured.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

8. “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.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

9. “Even as a professional in an integrated world, I had been the only black woman in enough drawing rooms and boardrooms to have an inkling of the chutzpah it took for an African American woman in a segregated southern workplace to tell her bosses she was sure her calculations would put a man on the Moon.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

10. “Many times, when children enter school they shun mathematics and science during the years when they should be learning the basics.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

11. “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.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

12. “She always kept up the questioning until she received a satisfactory answer.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

13. “They turned their desks into a trigonometric war room, poring over equations scrawling ideas on blackboards, evaluating their work, erasing it, starting over.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

14. “As fantastical as America’s space ambitions might have seemed, sending a man into space was starting to feel like a straightforward task compared to putting black and white students together in the same Virginia classrooms.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

15. “First in space means first, period,” declared Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson. “Second in space is second in everything.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

16. “Restaurants that refused to serve Dorothy Vaughan had no problem waiting on Germans from the prisoner-of-war camp housed in a detention facility under the James River Bridge in Newport News.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

17. “There was virtually no aspect of twentieth-century defense technology that had not been touched by the hands and minds of female mathematicians.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

18. “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.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

19. “The war, however, and the rhetoric that accompanied it created an urgency in the black community to call in the long overdue debt their country owed them. “Men of every creed and every race, wherever they lived in the world” were entitled to “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear, Roosevelt said, addressing the American people in his 1941 State of the Union address.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

20. “Is the kind of America I know worth defending?”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

21. “As far as segregationists were concerned, racial integration and communism were one and the same and posed the same kind of threat to traditional American values. Yet those charged with mounting the American offence in space saw strength in countering the Russian values of secrecy with its opposites – transparency, democracy, equality- and not a simulacrum.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

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

— Margot Lee Shetterly

23. “But simple luck is the random birthright of the hapless. 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 thing encounters something else: the unexpected. It comes from being in a position to seize opportunity from the happy marriage of time, place, and chance.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

24. “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.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

25. “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.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

26. “What I changed, I could; what I couldn’t, I endured,” Dorothy Vaughan told historian Beverly Golemba in 1992.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

27. “The cruelty of racial prejudice was so often accompanied by absurdity, a tangle of arbitrary rules and distinctions that subverted the shared interests of people who had been taught to see themselves as irreconcilably different.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

28. “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.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

29. “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.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

30. “What I wanted was for them to have a grand, sweeping narrative that they deserved, the kind of American history that belongs to the Wright Brothers and the astronauts, to Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King Jr. Not told as a separate history, but as part of the story we all know. Not at the margins, but at the very center, the protagonists of the drama. And not just because they are black, or because they are women, but because they are part of the American epic.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

31. “Virginia, a state with one of the highest concentrations of scientific talent in the world, led the nation in denying education to its youth.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

32. “Education topped her list of ideals; it was the surest hedge against a world that would require more of her children than white children, and attempt to give them less in return.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

33. “The community certainly included black English professors, like my mother, as well as black doctors and dentists, black mechanics, janitors, and contractors, black cobblers, wedding planners, real estate agents, and undertakers, several black lawyers, and a handful of black Mary Kay salespeople. 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.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

34. “Nationally, Virginia’s white teachers ranked in the bottom quarter in public school salaries, and their black counterparts might earn almost 50 percent less.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

35. “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.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

36. “You can’t leave the show,” King told Nichols. “We are there because you are there.” Black people have been imagined in the future, he continued, emphasizing to the actress how important and ground breaking a fact that was. Furthermore, he told her, he had studied the Starfleet’s command structure and believed that it mirrored that of the US Air Force, making Uhura – a black woman! – fourth in command of the ship.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

37. “Five of my father’s seven siblings made their bones as engineers or technologists, and some of his best buddies – David Woods, Elijah Kent, Weldon Staton – carved out successful engineering careers at Langley. Our next-door neighbor taught physics at Hampton University. Our church abounded with mathematicians. Supersonics experts held leadership positions in my mother’s sorority, and electrical engineers sat.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

38. “Women occupied many of the cubicles; they answered phones and sat in front of typewriters, but they also made hieroglyphic marks on transparent slides and conferred with my father and other men in the office on the stacks of documents that littered their desks. 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.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

39. “Claiming to be the front line of defense for the entire South and its “way of life,” the southern Democrats who ruled the state passed a package of laws that gave the legislature the right to close any public school that tried to integrate.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

40. “War, technology, and social progress; it seemed that the second two always came with the first.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

41. “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.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

42. “Insatiably curious about the world.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

43. “There is evidence of the triumph of meritocracy, that each of us should be allowed to rise as far as our talent and hard work can take us.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

44. “So many ways to screw the pooch, and just one staggeringly complex, scrupulously modeled, endlessly rehearsed, indefatigably tested way to succeed.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

45. “Eighty percent of the world’s population is colored,” the NACA’s chief legal counsel Paul Dembling had written in a 1956 file memo. “In trying to provide leadership in world events, it is necessary for this country to indicate to the world that we practice equality for all within this country. Those countries where colored persons constitute a majority should not be able to point to a double standard existing within the United States.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

46. “But perhaps most important, Katherine Johnson’s story can be a doorway to the stories of all the other women, black and white, whose contributions have been overlooked. By recognizing the full complement of extraordinary ordinary women who have contributed to the success of NASA, we can change our understanding of their abilities from the exception to the rule. Their goal wasn’t to stand out because of their differences; it was to fit in because of their talent.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

47. “Ideals without practical solutions were empty promises.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

48. “Should African Americans fight for freedom overseas when they did not experience it for themselves at home?”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

49. “From the fissure of their ever-present double consciousness sprang the idea of the double victory, articulated by James Thompson in his letter to the Pittsburgh Courier: “Let colored Americans adopt the double VV for a double victory; the first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies within.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly

50. “A tiny error in judgment or a second of delay could mean disaster.”

— Margot Lee Shetterly