Hidden Figures Quotes
"Years and miles away from home could never attenuate the city’s hold on my identity."
"Growing up in Hampton, the face of science was brown like mine."
"My father, who built his first rocket in junior high metal shop class."
"The spark of curiosity soon became an all-consuming fire."
"The community certainly included black English professors, as well as black doctors and dentists."
"As late as 1970, just 1 percent of all American engineers were black."
"NASA’s African American employees learned to navigate their way through the space agency’s engineering culture."
"For a group of bright and ambitious African American women, Hampton, Virginia, must have felt like the center of the universe."
"The idea that black women had been recruited to work as mathematicians at NASA during segregation defies our expectations."
"This war is being fought in the laboratories as well as on the battlefields."
"You are no better than anyone else, and no one is better than you."
"In the hierarchy of racial slights, the sign wasn’t unusual or out of the ordinary."
"This was the kind of garden-variety segregation that over the years blacks had learned to tolerate."
"The signs and their removal were a regular topic of conversation among the women."
"Negro life in America was a never-ending series of negotiations: when to fight and when to concede."
"The war could be 'the greatest break in history for minority groups.'"
"They wore their professional clothes like armor. They wielded their work like weapons."
"At some point during the war, the COLORED COMPUTERS sign disappeared into Miriam Mann’s purse and never came back."
"The faithful filled churches, giving thanks and imploring their creator to allow this one to be the war to truly end all wars."
"With victory over the enemies from without assured, Negroes took stock of their own battlefield."
"It wasn’t the way Dorothy would have wanted to take the next step in her career, but Blanche’s tragedy pushed her up the ladder nonetheless."
"Finding a way to move from being one of the girls to one of the Head Girls took time and persistence, pluck and luck."
"The view from the supervisor’s desk wasn’t that different from being at the head of the classroom at Moton."
"History would prove them all right: there was no one better qualified for the job than Dorothy Vaughan."
"It was no small irony that Woodrow Wilson, the president who had authorized the creation of the NACA, was the very same one who was hell-bent on making racial segregation in the Civil Service part of his enduring legacy."
"Mary’s presence at the laboratory built on plantation land rebuked the short-sighted intolerance of her fellow Virginian."
"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."
"The rivalry between the onetime allies exploded into open war-by-proxy along the border between North and South Korea in 1950."
"The United States’ anxiety over the threat posed by the Soviet Union had increased steadily since the end of World War II."
"Foreigners who traveled to the United States often experienced the caste system firsthand."
"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 West Area Computers were ammunition for both fronts of the conflict, yet they were one of the best-kept secrets in the federal government."
"The laboratory has one work unit composed entirely of Negro women, the West Area Computers, which may fall into the category of a segregated work unit."
"No matter how abstract the work or how conceptual the problem being solved, no one at Langley ever forgot that behind the numbers was a real-world goal: faster planes, more efficient planes, safer planes."
"Being willing to stand up to the pressure of an opinionated, impatient engineer who put his feet up on the desk and waited while you did the work, to spot the bug in his logic and tell him in no uncertain terms that he was the one who was wrong—that was a rarer quality."
"For Katherine, being selected to rotate through Building 1244, the kingdom of the fresh-air engineers, felt like an unexpected bit of fortune."
"But Katherine Goble had been raised not just to command equal treatment for herself but also to extend it to others."
"She didn’t close her eyes to the racism that existed; she knew just as well as any other black person the tax levied upon them because of their color. But she didn’t feel it in the same way."
"Katherine Goble’s genuine comfort with the white men she worked with allowed her to be herself with them, no mask required."
"Katherine was her father’s daughter, after all. She exiled the demons to a place where they could do no harm, then she opened her brown bag and enjoyed lunch at her new desk, her mind focusing on the good fortune that had befallen her."
"The grief that washed over Barbara Johns gave way to anger, then took hold in her as a hunger for justice that would not be denied."
"Not Willing to Wait: NAACP Leaders Want Integration ‘Now!’"
"If we can organize the Southern States for massive resistance to this order I think that, in time, the rest of the country will realize that racial integration is not going to be accepted in the South."
"Virtually every review of the situation questioned how much desperately needed brainpower was being squandered by the intentional neglect of America’s Negro schools."
"It was the engineer who faced the firing-squad editorial review board to defend the collective effort represented by the research report."
"As a son of the South, Thomas Byrdsong knew all too well the consequences that might befall a black man who openly expressed his anger in front of white people."
"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."
"Being on the leading edge of integration was not for the faint of heart."
"Each upheaval caused Americans of every background to ask themselves and each other, What are we fighting for?"
"For democracy abroad and at home. So they took up arms again: on the battlefields, in the classrooms and voting booths, in the nation’s capital—and in the offices of the Langley Aeronautical Laboratory."
"Let her go," they finally said, exasperated. The engineers just got tired of saying no."
"Effective this date, the West Area Computers Unit is dissolved."
"Tell me where you want the man to land, and I’ll tell you where to send him up."
"Her grasp of analytical geometry was as good as that of the guys she worked with, perhaps better."
"In the recovery of an artificial earth satellite it is necessary to bring the satellite over a preselected point above the earth from which the reentry is to be initiated."
"Katherine should finish the report. She’s done most of the work anyway."
"The first challenge many blacks faced in participating in something like the All-American Soap Box Derby was finding out about it in the first place."
"Achievement through hard work, social progress through science, possibility through belief."
"If anyone could bear witness to the long-term impact of persistent action, and also to the strength of the forces opposing change, it was Dorothy Vaughan."
"The astronauts, by background and by nature, resisted the computers and their ghostly intellects."
"Get the girl to check the numbers. If she says the numbers are good, I'm ready to go."
"Everything rested upon the brain busters’ mastery of the laws of physics and mathematics."
"America Is for Everybody," proclaimed the US Department of Labor brochure that landed on Katherine Johnson’s desk in May 1963.
"There wasn’t one day when I didn’t wake up excited to go to work." - Katherine Johnson
"Math was either right or wrong, and if you got it right, it didn’t matter what color you were." - Katherine Johnson
"You have to expect progress to be made." - Katherine Johnson
"Once you took the first step, anything was possible." - Katherine Johnson
"It’s a story of hope, that even among some of our country’s harshest realities... there is evidence of the triumph of meritocracy."
"Their goal wasn’t to stand out because of their differences; it was to fit in because of their talent."
"Luck favored the prepared." - Katherine Johnson
"I loved every single day of it." - Katherine Johnson on her work
"What could be more American than the story of a gifted little girl who counted her way from West Virginia to the stars?"
"Their shared desire to do things of value for other people... served to deepen their personal bonds."
"They were just doing their jobs." - on the women mathematicians at NASA
"Every time we get a chance to get ahead they move the finish line. Every time."
"Science, all science, is the search for truth."
"The fight for equality is the fight for progress, not just for those who have been denied it, but for everyone."
"Determination, resilience, and persistence are the enablers of dreams."
"In the face of adversity, we have a choice: to fight for what is right or to be overwhelmed by the challenges."
"Knowledge is power. Information is liberating."
"Equality is not just a dream, but a right that all deserve."
"To stand up for what is right is to give voice to those who have been silenced."
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle."
"One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind."
"Bravery is not the absence of fear, but the action in the face of fear."
"The quest for knowledge and truth is a journey that never ends."
"In unity, there is strength; in diversity, there is power."