Conclusion
His knack for playful epigrams sometimes belies the fact that Phillips is always questioning, probing, thinking, examining, and second-guessing. Unafraid to revise his ideas, or to challenge those of others, he seems to have little interest in academic respectability and to do "little to seek out the fame that he enjoys in the literary world." But while prepared even in the heyday of neoliberalism to consider the possibility that "we have been too successful at success and failure...in a culture so bewitched...by the idea of success", he is nevertheless realistic enough to acknowledge that "personal development necessitates a certain moral opportunism"; and may even have been speaking from personal experience when he concluded in Going Sane that "the best lives, like the worst lives, are driven lives."
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“I have come to the conclusion that the closer people are to what may be called the front lines of government ... the easier it is to see the immediate underbrush, the individual tree trunks of the moment, and to forget the nobility the usefulness and the wide extent of the forest itself.... They forget that politics after all is only an instrument through which to achieve Government.”
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