Explore Quotes by C. Northcote Parkinson

Men enter local politics solely as a result of being unhappily married.

Time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.

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 anything for himself.

Expenditure rises to meet income.

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

Where life is colorful and varied, religion can be austere or unimportant. Where life is appallingly monotonous, religion must be emotional, dramatic and intense. Without the curry, boiled rice can be very dull.

The smaller the function, the greater the management.

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, scattering the seed from which other committees will bloom in their turn.

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

The Law of Triviality... briefly stated, it means that the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.

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

Delay is the deadliest form of denial.

It is the busiest man who has time to spare.

People of great ability do not emerge, as a rule, from the happiest background. So far as my own observation goes, I would conclude that ability, although hereditary, is improved by an early measure of adversity and improved again by a later measure of success.

Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.

The onset of one religion can be resisted only by another.

Expenditures rise to meet income.

When any organizational entity expands beyond 21 members, the real power will be in some smaller body.

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