We survey some classical norm inequalities of Hardy, Kallman, Kato, Kolmogorov, Landau, Littlewood, and Rota of the type [ |A f|_{mathcal{X}}^2 leq C |f|_{mathcal{X}} big|A^2 fbig|_{mathcal{X}}, quad f in dombig(A^2big), ] and recall that under exceedingly stronger hypotheses on the operator $A$ and/or the Banach space $mathcal{X}$, the optimal constant $C$ in these inequalities diminishes from $4$ (e.g., when $A$ is the generator of a $C_0$ contraction semigroup on a Banach space $mathcal{X}$) all the way down to $1$ (e.g., when $A$ is a symmetric operator on a Hilbert space $mathcal{H}$). We also survey some results in connection with an extension of the Hardy-Littlewood inequality involving quadratic forms as initiated by Everitt.