95 Quotes by Margot Lee Shetterly

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.

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.

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.

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

The deep humanitarianism that was her family inheritance had taught her to see achievement as something that functioned like a bank account, something you drew on when you were in need and made deposits to when you were blessed with a surplus.

Evolution occurred in scientific progress as it happened in nature: a positive trait was passed along, then proliferated; obsolete characteristics withered away, and the technology and the organization evolved into something new.

Math was either right or wrong, and if you got it right, it didn't matter what color you were.

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

But years and miles away from home could never attenuate the city's hold on my identity, and the more I explored places and people far from Hampton, the more my status as one of its daughters came to mean to me.