Quotes by C. Parkinson

• 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 anything for himself.
• The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take.
• Time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.
• Men enter local politics solely as a result of being unhappily married.
• When any organizational entity expands beyond 21 members, the real power will be in some smaller body.
• It is better to be a has-been than a never-was.
• 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.
• 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.
• Make the people sovereign and the poor will use the machinery of government to dispossess the rich.
• Expenditures rise to meet income.
• Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.
• Delay is the deadliest form of denial.
• 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.
• 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.