What's the difference between idealistic and quixotic?

Idealistic


Definition:

  • (a.) Of or pertaining to idealists or their theories.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) The young European idealist who helped Leon Brittan, the British EU commissioner, to negotiate Chinese entry to the World Trade Organisation, also found his Spanish lawyer wife in Brussels.
  • (2) Valls immediately attacked Hamon as an idealist who couldn’t win the presidential election and styled himself as the voice of the serious left in government.
  • (3) The Lewinsky affair did not leave him disillusioned and Engskov's eyes brighten as he recalls his time in Washington: "It was an idealistic time.
  • (4) Far from being disgusted with her physicality, Ruskin – a rigorous Christian and idealist – felt anxious and subconsciously betrayed by the realisation that his love for Effie was a one-sided affair.
  • (5) Yes, sounding on about the ethical dimension to public service can sound corny and implausible when you have ministers rubbishing the state and all its works, but you and the vast majority of your civil service colleagues are doing the job because you are idealists.
  • (6) We are brought up to emphasise ideology, to neglect psychology and to observe government as a series of clashes between big people with big ideas acting in ways that are by turns manipulative and idealistic but explicable.
  • (7) It’s idealistic, it’s the right thing to do even if it turns out to be utterly futile.
  • (8) Similarities between the notion of life style and concepts of cultural integration are noted, and the various uses of life style are categorized along an idealist-materialist continuum.
  • (9) It may however, serve as an example of how idealistic principles might be combined with realism derived directly from clinical practice, and may thus serve to inspire others along similar paths.
  • (10) With Veep , rather than striving young idealists, you have cowardly egomaniacs and bunglers who are involved in endless arse-covering exercises.
  • (11) Never work for an organisation without proper security measures I was young, idealistic, naive and working in an active conflict zone for a small local NGO.
  • (12) About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along But Swartz's death came like a thunderbolt in cyberspace, because this insanely talented, idealistic, complex, diminutive lad was a poster boy for everything that we value about the networked world.
  • (13) The search for a synthesis bridging the gap between materialist and idealist approaches in anthropological theory has been invigorated by recent efforts to develop a critical medical anthropology.
  • (14) DanceSafe's Messer, a veteran of the idealistic PLUR (peace, love, unity, respect) oriented rave underground of the 90s, complains that the dance festivals offer a "packaged, containerised experience ...
  • (15) Goldsmith is an idealist and comes from a family that doesn’t shift its convictions easily and which knows how to run campaigns.
  • (16) The Greens – young, highly educated, cosmopolitan liberal idealists – are more or less the polar opposite to Ukip’s ageing, socially conservative, nationalist electorate.
  • (17) Although self-immolation as social protest was widely publicized during the years surveyed, the authors note that these individuals all attempted suicide for personal and irrational rather than morally idealistic reasons.
  • (18) Rather, it is that they have increasingly used the language of rights to express their idealistic goals (or to conceal their strategic goals).
  • (19) Idealistic and metaphysical concepts of the structure-function relationships (morphological idealism, holism, physiological idealism, functionalism) are critisized, and historical premises of these concepts are characterized.
  • (20) The creative risk – such as it is – within the new series centres on the retelling of real events as they would have been covered by this idealistic newsroom.

Quixotic


Definition:

  • (a.) Like Don Quixote; romantic to extravagance; absurdly chivalric; apt to be deluded.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Tap the relevant details into Google, though, and the real names soon appear before your eyes: the boss in question, stern and yet oddly quixotic, is Phyllis Westberg of Harold Ober Associates.
  • (2) It also highlights how mass-resettlement is not a quixotic policy; it has been achieved before in the aftermath of a bloody war – and could be achieved again.
  • (3) Based more on disappointment in McConnell than Bevin's promise (or crazy talk), his otherwise quixotic campaign (unseating a five-term minority leader) has gotten national attention and support from the likes of the Senate Conservative Fund (early backers of Cruz and Lee, as well as Cotton) and Palin.
  • (4) Asked why he had not relied on US intelligence for a claim with extraordinary legal implications, Trump offered a quixotic reply: “Because I don’t want to do anything that’s going to violate any strength of an agency.
  • (5) Gilliam also said that he would be restarting work on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote next year.
  • (6) There are further echoes, inevitably, of films about the quixotic, sometimes cruel exercise of journalistic power in Citizen Kane and the Sweet Smell of Success.
  • (7) Gilliam himself took to the stage to reveal plans for his long-delayed film version of the story of Don Quixote - the feature he was forced to abandon in 1999 after a freak storm destroyed his set.
  • (8) The world is flat in ways the high-flying global theoreticians don't always acknowledge; these days, even someone from the materially fortunate parts of the world – a man with a ruddy complexion, a woman in a Prada suit – is pulled aside for what is quixotically known as "random screening".
  • (9) It appears the Don Quixote that finally makes it into multiplexes will be radically different from that which might once have been seen.
  • (10) 4.31pm BST Texas Senator Ted Cruz, whose quixotic campaign to "defund" Obamacare was the stick in the spokes that got us here, could – could – cause a default all by himself, Joshua Green reports in Bloomberg BusinessWeek: How could this happen?
  • (11) The hard graft for centre-left parties across Europe is to turn this around – not to be a 21st-century Don Quixote forever tilting at 19th- or 20th-century windmills.
  • (12) Perhaps it is the classically gaunt face, or maybe it is the aquiline nose, but he looks exactly like Don Quixote.
  • (13) LA cyclists, until then lonely, quixotic figures, felt emboldened to organise their own rides, using force of numbers to co-exist with traffic in mass rides, and for races acting like flash mobs, briefly sealing off an alley here, a boulevard there.
  • (14) Royal Ballet Christmas season Instead of its regular Christmas staples – The Nutcracker, Cinderella or The Tales of Beatrix Potter – the Royal is courting the festive box office with two recent productions: Christopher Wheeldon’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Carlos Acosta’s Don Quixote.
  • (15) Remember Yusor Abu-Salha as more than just a victim of the Chapel Hill shooting | Rana Odeh Read more But even setting aside the questions that must be asked by law enforcement – and even now, we are learning more about the accused killer, including details of a stash of weapons he reportedly had at his apartment – the local community, and America at large, must begin the quixotic mission of trying to find deeper meaning in the tragedy.
  • (16) Suddenly we've discovered in our midst an exotic prancer, a quixotic chancer, an electronic Elgar who has penned some of the gaudiest, most soaring rock and roll anthems to be heard in a decade.
  • (17) Breezeblocks is the sort of idiosyncratic indie we'd imagine bands we've never heard such as Swell Maps or Arab Strap would have purveyed, affirming that there are quixotic imaginations at work here.
  • (18) He told Podemos’s followers to dream and, like that noble madman Don Quixote, “take their dreams seriously”.
  • (19) He made his name with quixotic docs about Elvis, medieval animal trials and US murder sprees, and went on to direct Man on Wire , which won him an Oscar in 2009, as well as films such as 2012's Shadow Dancer .
  • (20) Lars Von Trier is known for being unpredictable, quixotic, puckish and deliberately provocative.