And yet, I persist in this quixotic endeavor.

Russia s leaders have earned a reputation for being unreliable, quixotic, and unpredictable, but markets like trustworthiness, stability, and predictability. Not surprisingly, foreign investors no longer favor Putin s Russia.

My own efforts to advance the cause of UN reform when I was Australia s foreign minister were about as quixotic and unproductive as anything I have ever tried to do. Overhauling Secretariat structures and processes to reduce duplication, waste, and irrelevance?

This quixotic strategy met with unexpected success when Federal Judge Thomas Griesa ruled in the holdouts favor. Griesa idiosyncratically reinterpreted the pari passu, or equal treatment, clause in the debt contracts to mean that vulture funds refusing to participate in the earlier debt exchange should receive not 30 but 100 cents on the dollar.

Part of the key to China s long run success has been its almost unique combination of pragmatism and vision. While much of the rest of the developing world, following the Washington Consensus, has been directed at a quixotic quest for higher GDP, China has once again made clear that it seeks sustainable and more equitable increases in real living standards.

In today s free market carnival, nothing seems visible unless it is scandalous and nothing is scandalous enough to be memorable. So we pay homage to Cervantes at a time when we routinely co habit with a very different outrageousness religious fanaticism and terrorism, political manipulation, the cacophony of perverted simplification, the belligerent marriage between a new messianism and an aggrandizing quixotic blindness.