"A perfection of planned layout is achieved only by institutions on the point of collapse."

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion... Politicians and taxpayers have assumed that a rising total in the number of civil servants must reflect a growing volume of work to be done. Cynics, in questioning this belief, have imagined that the multiplication of officials must have left some of them idle or all of them able to work for shorter hours. But this is a matter in which faith and doubt seem equally misplaced. The fact is that the number of the officials and the quantity of the work are not related to each other at all. The rise in the total of those employed is governed by Parkinson's Law and would be much the same whether the volume of the work were to increase, diminish, or even disappear. The importance of Parkinson's Law lies in the fact that it is a law of growth based upon an analysis of the factors by which that growth is controlled.”

“Delay is the deadliest form of denial.”

“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.”

“Expansion means complexity, and complexity decay.”

“The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.”

“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.”