C. Northcote Parkinson Quotes

• Expenditure rises to meet income.

  C. Northcote Parkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

• Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

  C. Northcote Parkinson

  Topics in Work

  Tags in Available, Completion

• Delay is the deadliest form of denial.

  C. Northcote Parkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Delay

• It is better to be a has-been than a never-was.

  C. Northcote Parkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Better

• 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

  Topics in Nature

  Tags in Rather, Takes

• In politics people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want.

  C. Northcote Parkinson

  Topics in Politics

  Tags in Deserve

• 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

  Topics in Life

  Tags in Lost

• Expenditures rise to meet income.

  C. Northcote Parkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Rise, Income

• Men enter local politics solely as a result of being unhappily married.

  C. Northcote Parkinson

  Topics in Politics

  Tags in Men

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Time, Law

• Make the people sovereign and the poor will use the machinery of government to dispossess the rich.

  C. Northcote Parkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Government, Rich, Poor

• The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.

  C. Northcote Parkinson

  Topics in Society

  Tags in Boredom

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

  C. Northcote Parkinson

  Topics in Power

  Tags in Real

• Perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse.

  C. Northcote Parkinson

  Topics in Perfection

• The smaller the function, the greater the management.

  C. Northcote Parkinson

  Topics in Management

  Tags in Function

• Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.

  C. Northcote Parkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Focus

• 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

  Topics in Decision

  Tags in Important

• Time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.

  C. Northcote Parkinson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Time

C. Northcote Parkinson (18)

Birth:	30th July, 1909
Death:	9th March, 1993
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Historian, Novelist

About

Cyril Northcote Parkinson was born in Barnard Castle, County Durham, England. He was a British naval historian and author of some 60 books, the most famous of which was his best-seller Parkinson's Law, which led him to be also considered as an important scholar in public administration and management. He received a BA degree in 1932. In 1934, then a graduate student at King's College London, he wrote his PhD thesis on Trade and War in the Eastern Seas, 1803–1810, which was awarded the Julian Corbett Prize in Naval History for 1935. The papers formed the basis of his first book, Edward Pellew, Viscount Exmouth, Admiral of the Red.

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