Top 35 C. Northcote Parkinson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Parkinson’s First Law: Work expands to fill the time available.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

Featured in: Common Sense Quotes, Time Management Quotes, Funny Work Quotes, Funny Office Quotes

2. “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.””

— C. Northcote Parkinson

3. “The void created by the failure to communicate is soon filled with poison, drivel and misrepresentation.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

4. “It is the busiest man who has time to spare.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

5. “Delay is the deadliest form of denial.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

6. “A luxury, once enjoyed, becomes a necessity.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

7. “Expenditure rises to meet income.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

8. “When any organizational entity expands beyond 21 members, the real power will be in some smaller body.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

9. “The smaller the function, the greater the management.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

10. “The nice thing about standards is, there are so many to choose from. Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

11. “Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

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

— C. Northcote Parkinson

13. “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.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

14. “Perfection of planning is a symptom of decay. During a period of exciting discovery or progress, there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

15. “The man who is denied the opportunity of taking decisions of importance begins to regard as important the decisions he is allowed to take.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

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

— C. Northcote Parkinson

17. “Administrators make work for each other so that they can multiply the number of their subordinates and enhance their prestige.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

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

— C. Northcote Parkinson

19. “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...”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

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

— C. Northcote Parkinson

21. “Work gets done in the time available.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

22. “Deliberative bodies become decreasingly effective after they pass five to eight members.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

23. “Imagination is essential and it comes first, for without imagination we are aimless.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

24. “It is now well known, however, that men enter local politics solely as a result of being unhappily married.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

25. “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

26. “Parkinson’s Law is a purely scientific discovery, inapplicable except in theory to the politics of the day. 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.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

27. “Perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

28. “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.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

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

— C. Northcote Parkinson

30. “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

31. “The mind reels at the multiplication of books intended to justify the author’s promotion from assistant to associate professor.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

32. “The onset of one religion can be resisted only by another.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

33. “Make the people sovereign and the poor will use the machinery of government to dispossess the rich.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

34. “A committee grows organically, flourishes and blossoms, sunlit on top and shady beneath, until it dies, scattering the seeds from which other committees will spring.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson

35. “In the foundation and development of a successful enterprise there must be a single-minded pursuit of financial profit.”

— C. Northcote Parkinson