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.
– C. Northcote Parkinson
Delay is the deadliest form of denial.
– C. Northcote Parkinson
Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.
– C. Northcote Parkinson
Expenditures rise to meet income.
– C. Northcote Parkinson
Make the people sovereign and the poor will use the machinery of government to dispossess the rich.
– C. Northcote Parkinson
Perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.
– C. Northcote Parkinson
The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.
– C. Northcote Parkinson
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.
– C. Northcote Parkinson
The smaller the function, the greater the management.
– C. Northcote Parkinson
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.
– C. Northcote Parkinson
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
– C. Northcote Parkinson
Men enter local politics solely as a result of being unhappily married.
– C. Northcote Parkinson
In politics people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want.