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.

Margot Lee Shetterly

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.

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 of the forces of history or superheroes who acquire mythic status not just because of their deeds but because of their scarcity.

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

Growing up in Hampton, the face of science was brown like mine.

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 this group of black engineers and scientists within this larger NASA community.

Margot Lee Shetterly

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.

Margot Lee Shetterly

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

Margot Lee Shetterly

Katherine Johnson actually integrated the public university in West Virginia. And Mary Jackson had to petition state courts to be allowed to attend an all-white college to get the qualifications needed to become an engineer. At every turn, these women were involved in the Second World War, the Cold War, the civil rights movement.

Margot Lee Shetterly

I was surprised how little I knew about the significant contributions to aviation that had happened right there in Hampton, Virginia.

Margot Lee Shetterly

I remember 'The Norfolk Journal and Guide,' which is a black newspaper that still exists, but it was really influential, as you can imagine, in the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties. But all of their archives are online and digitized, and it was a really great resource.

Margot Lee Shetterly

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

Margot Lee Shetterly

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.

Margot Lee Shetterly

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

Margot Lee Shetterly

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.

Margot Lee Shetterly

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.

Margot Lee Shetterly

A lot of times, when you have a story of minorities in America, it's always this super, oppositional thing. It's segregation, it's the racism, and those are the hard facts of the story.

Margot Lee Shetterly

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

Margot Lee Shetterly

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.

Margot Lee Shetterly

That's what 'Star Trek' was: We don't know how to make an ideal society, but we're going to portray that, and then we're going to work backward. I think that's why science fiction - despite the dystopian parts - comes out of this super ideal that, eventually, we will get to some better place where we actually live up to our ideals.

Margot Lee Shetterly

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

Margot Lee Shetterly