Quotes by C. Northcote Parkinson

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

“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...”

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

“In politics people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want.”

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

“Delay is the deadliest form of denial.”

“Expenditure rises to meet income.”

“It is not the business of the botanist to eradicate the weeds. Enough for him if he can tell us just how fast they grow.”

“The 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... Politicians and taxpayers have assumed (with occasional phases of doubt) that a rising total in the number of civil servants must...”

“A 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.”

“Expansion means complexity, and complexity decay.”