C. Northcote Parkinson Quotes

If you want to kill any idea in the world, get a committee working on it.

Misdirected focus on paperwork, on procedures, and on bureaucracy frustrates teachers and fails to give children the education they need.

There's a can't-do attitude in this town [Washington DC] that I haven't seen anywhere else ... It's like running through a field of marshmallows in terms of getting anything done.

I can see how paperwork and foolishness can destroy something.

Management cares about only one thing. Paperwork. They will forgive almost anything else - cost overruns, gross incompetence, criminal indictments - as long as the paperwork's filled out properly. And in on time.

Paperwork will ruin any military force.

It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.

What the world really needs is more love and less paper work.

Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it.

You talk to the real cops and they say ninety percent of it is paperwork.

The politics of Europe is unimaginative and bureaucratic.

When one begins to live by habit and by quotation, one has begun to stop living.

The perfect bureaucrat … is the man who manages to make no decisions and escape all responsibility.

Should bureaucratic ways prevail and paper reign supreme? Should red tape and the Status Quo become our nation’s dream?

It is an inevitable defect, that bureaucrats will care more for routine than for results.

A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing, but together can decide that nothing can be done.

A hospital ought to be a house of healing, not a monument to paperwork and bureaucracy.

One thing the United Nation is good at is producing documents.

Superfluous bureaucracies and the system of file-keeping and paper-shuffling that is enforced by them … are totally alien to Islam

Our two greatest problems are gravity and paper work. We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.

And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind.

The explosion would be just the right size to maximize the amount of paperwork your lab would face. If the explosion were smaller, you could potentially cover it up. If it were larger, there would be no one left in the city to submit paperwork to.

But the grind has begun. The windows don’t open, and even the availability of near-constant jokes about Jews and Mormons fails to stem the tide of frustration, decay. We’ve reached the end of pure inspiration, and are now somewhere else, something implying routine, or doing something because people expect us to do it, going somewhere each day because we went there the day before, saying things because we have said them before, and this seems like the work of a different sort of animal, contrary to our plan, and this is very very bad.

It must be a source of great chagrin to those in charge to think of so many people being able to stick a stamp on a letter and drop it in a mail box without any trouble or suffering at all. They are probably working on a system this very minute, trying to devise some way in which the public can be made to fill out a blank, stand in line, consult some underling who will refer him to a superior, and then be made to black up with burned cork before they can mail a letter.

Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.