48 Quotes by C. Northcote Parkinson

Expenditures rise to meet income.

The matters most debated in a deliberative body tend to be the minor ones where everybody understands the issues.

The basic quality for the diplomat is not intelligence but loyalty.

Parkinson's Fourth Law: The number of people in any working group tends to increase regardless of the amount of work to be done.

If there is a way to delay an important decision, the good bureaucracy, public or private, will find it.

The vacuum created by a failure to communicate will quickly be filled with rumor, misrepresentations, drivel, and poison.

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. General recognition of this fact is shown in the proverbial phrase "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.

Parkinson's First Law: Work expands to fill the time available.