Creativity Quote by Geezer Butler

Geezer Butler’s line lands like a weary riff: not despair, but betrayal. “I don’t feel a lack of hope” is a deliberate dodge from the easy nihilism people project onto heavy metal. He refuses the romantic posture of total darkness. Instead, he names something more politically useful and more corrosive: disappointment. Hope can coexist with anger; disappointment implies you expected better, that progress was promised, that someone sold you a future and pocketed the change.

The second sentence tightens the screw. “After all these years” carries the generational sting of someone who’s watched the same movie on repeat: new slogans, new uniforms, same body count. Coming from Butler - whose Black Sabbath helped soundtrack post-Vietnam dread and Cold War paranoia - it’s not abstract anti-war sentiment. It’s lived historical fatigue, the sense that the machinery never got dismantled, it just got rebranded.

“Meaningless wars” isn’t a claim that suffering is small; it’s an accusation that the stated reasons are flimsy compared to the real incentives. Then the kicker: “for a handful of people.” That phrase refuses the comfortable idea of collective necessity. It points at concentrated benefit, at elites who profit from conflict while outsourcing risk to ordinary bodies and budgets. The subtext is class-conscious without being slogan-y: wars are marketed as national duty, but the dividends are private.

It works because it’s plainspoken and unsentimental. Butler isn’t selling salvation. He’s calling out the scam - and keeping enough hope intact to keep calling.