Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them.

It isn't freedom from. It's freedom to.

To take a stand for the future is to bring forth a new opportunity, not one derived from the past, but an opportunity created from a future to which we give ourselves.

Freedom is essentially a condition of inequality, not equality. It recognizes as a fact of nature the structural differences inherent in man — in temperament, character, and capacity — and it respects those differences. We are not alike and no law can make us so.

And what is freedom, you ask? It means not being a slave to any circumstance, to any constraint, to any chance; it means compelling Fortune to enter the lists on equal terms.

Everything is conditioned by necessity of one kind or another; and if it were actually possible to find a person in conditions of total freedom, he would be like some deep water fish that had been dragged up to the surface. It's curious to reflect that Rublyov worked within the strictures of the canon! And the longer I live in the West the more curious and equivocal freedom seems to me. Freedom to take drugs? To kill? To commit suicide?

What would it be like if I were free, not enslaved by my conditioning?

Remember, it’s not conditions but decisions that determine our lives.

Freedom to creat and construct, to wonder and to venture. Such freedom requires that the individual be active and responsible, not a slave or a well-fed cog in the machine . . . It is not enough that men are not slaves; if social conditions further the existence of automatons, the result will not be love of life, but love of death.

Freedom means the possibility to choose from a set of unfree options.

I posit myself as individual, in opposition to another individual, by ascribing to myself a sphere for my freedom, from which I exclude the other, and by ascribing to him a sphere, from which I exclude myself — of course, only in the thinking of a fact and by virtue of this fact. Hence, I have posited myself as free a side of him without danger to the possibility of his freedom. Through this positing of my freedom I have determined myself; to be free constitutes my essential character. But what does to be free mean? Evidently to be able to carry out the conceptions of acts I may entertain. But the carrying out always follows the conception, and the perception of the desired product of my causality is always — in relation to its first conception — a matter of the future. Freedom is therefore always posited in the future; and if it is to constitute the character of a being, it is posited for all the future of the individual; is posited in the future as far as the individual himself is posited in the future.

it’s not conditions but decisions that determine our lives.

Often, to be free means the ability to deal with the realities of one's own situation so as not to be overcome by them.

Our Behaviour is a function of our decisions, not our conditions