Hippomachus

They say that the trainer Hippomachus, when an athlete he was training competed in wrestling and everyone who was present applauded, struck the student with his staff. "You did it badly, and not as you should have," he said. "You should have done better. If you had done it artfully they would not have applauded you."

- from Various Histories, Aelian.

When some persons praised a tall fellow with a long reach as having the makings of a fine boxer, the trainer Hippomachus remarked: "Yes, if the crown were hung up and to be got by reaching."

- from Plutarch, On Love of Wealth.

For the stars

"He aimed for the stars, but sometimes he hit England."

- Mort Saul on Werner von Braun

the death of knowledge

"Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge." - Alfred North Whitehead

As quoted on the excellent futilitycloset.com

No misnomer

Gentleman in wigs and satin knee-britches composing philosophical tracts - the Founding Fathers (and their equally quaintly bedecked spouses) little resemble the 20th-century image of revolutionaries: Lenin atop a cannon rallying the sailors at Kronstadt, or Mao in peasant garb haranguing the troops on the Long March. But the American Revolution was no misnomer. It irreparably shattered the twin pillars of tradition: monarchical authority and hereditary privilege; it revivified an ancient experiment in democracy, conferring political form on a fractious people; and it loosened the bonds of society, giving free rein to acquisitive, religious, and reforming energies. More than its topographical constituents - mountains and farmlands, forests and towns - the new nation was an amalgam of ideas, extracted from classical Greece and Rome, from the Old and New Testaments, from peasant culture and Enlightenment philosophy, fused in the heat of war and invasion, and then poured, white hot, over much of North America, whose borders it eventually overspilled.

- from Mapping America's Past, pg. 60