C. Northcote Parkinson Quotes
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Delay is the deadliest form of denial.
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Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
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The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.
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Administrators make work for each other so that they can multiply the number of their subordinates and enhance their prestige.
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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.
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Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.
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Time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.
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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.
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Expenditures rise to meet income.
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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.
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The void created by the failure to communicate is soon filled with poison, drivel and misrepresentation.
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It is better to be a has-been than a never-was.
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Make the people sovereign and the poor will use the machinery of government to dispossess the rich.
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In politics people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want.
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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.
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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.
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Men enter local politics solely as a result of being unhappily married.
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The smaller the function, the greater the management.
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The vacuum created by a failure to communicate will quickly be filled with rumor, misrepresentations, drivel, and poison.
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When any organizational entity expands beyond 21 members, the real power will be in some smaller body.
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The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take.
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Perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.
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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 to discover. No Treasury official told Fleming to discover penicillin. Nor was Rutherford instructed to split the atom by a certain date.
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Parkinson's Fourth Law: The number of people in any working group tends to increase regardless of the amount of work to be done.