Politics & Power Quote by Arthur Hailey

Power doesn’t enter a room politely; it arrives as mood. Hailey’s line treats the president of General Motors less like a visionary executive than like a weather system rolling in over everyone’s day. “Foul humor” is deceptively small-bore language for a man positioned atop an industrial empire. That’s the point: in a corporate hierarchy, the boss’s irritation is not private psychology, it’s policy in embryo. A bad temper becomes a budget cut, a firing, a rushed decision that ripples through factories, dealerships, families.

The phrasing also performs a clever act of deflation. “The president of General Motors” is grand, institutional, almost ceremonial; “in a foul humor” yanks that grandeur back into the human and petty. Hailey isn’t interested in heroic capitalism. He’s interested in systems run by fallible people who still get indigestion, grudges, and panic. The line primes the reader for a chain reaction: when the top is unstable, the organization beneath starts bracing, posturing, and lying for cover.

Context matters because Hailey’s fiction is built on the machinery of modern life - airports, hotels, automakers - and on the idea that “big” is never abstract. GM is shorthand for mid-century American confidence: scale, chrome, jobs, national identity. By opening on executive sourness, Hailey suggests how thin the veneer is. One man’s mood can expose the brittleness inside a supposedly rational, engineered institution. The novelistic intent is pure momentum: you feel the coming pressure before you know the plot.