Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. General recognition of this fact is shown in the proverbial phrase "It is the busie….

A committee grows organically, flourishes and blossoms, sunlit on top and shady beneath, until it dies, scattering the seeds from which other committ….

Parkinson's Law is a purely scientific discovery, inapplicable except in theory to the politics of the day. It is not the business of the botanist to….

Perfection of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period of exciting discovery or progress, there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters..

A committee is organic rather than mechanical in its nature: it is not a structure but a plant. It takes root and grows, it flowers, wilts, and dies,….

The nice thing about standards is, there are so many to choose from. Work expands to fill the time available for its completion..

The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom..

Imagination is essential and it comes first, for without imagination we are aimless..

Expenditures rise to meet income..

Expansion means complexity and complexity decay..

No king or minister could have instructed Newton to discover the law of gravity, for they did not know and could not know that there was such a law t….

Make the people sovereign and the poor will use the machinery of government to dispossess the rich..

The smaller the function, the greater the management..

The man whose life is devoted to paperwork has lost the initiative. He is dealing with things that are brought to his notice, having ceased to notice….

If there is a way to delay an important decision, the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it..

The vacuum created by a failure to communicate will quickly be filled with rumor, misrepresentations, drivel, and poison..

It is now well known, however, that men enter local politics solely as a result of being unhappily married..

The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take. He becomes….

Parkinson's Fourth Law: The number of people in any working group tends to increase regardless of the amount of work to be done..

The basic quality for the diplomat is not intelligence but loyalty..

The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take..