Faith & Spirit Quote by Anne Sullivan

Sullivan lands a scalpel on a familiar human tic: when the universe stops making sense, somebody steps in to run it. The line is funny in a dry, New England way, but the humor is barbed. “Assume the responsibility of the world” evokes the busybody reformer, the moral accountant, the person who treats contingency as a personal insult. Then she twists the knife with “when God is neglectful,” a phrase that both mocks pious certainty and punctures the fantasy that suffering can always be arranged into a tidy lesson.

As an educator who worked intimately with Helen Keller, Sullivan lived in the daily vicinity of limits: bodies that don’t cooperate, institutions that fail, a society that patronizes. That experience gives the quote its bite. It’s not atheistic swagger so much as suspicion toward the emotional economy of grand explanations. When people can’t accept randomness, they inflate their own authority; they speak for Providence, prescribe meaning, assign blame. Sullivan frames that as a social nuisance, not a noble calling: we’re “bothered” by them because their certainty becomes coercive.

The subtext is a warning about moral overreach. Declaring that God has “neglected” something is already a claim to cosmic insight; taking over the job of running the world is worse, because it invites control masquerading as care. Sullivan is defending a more humane posture: attend to what’s in front of you, teach, assist, build tools for living, and resist the temptation to turn other people’s hardship into your stage for righteousness.