The choice of duty makes you free while choosing to be a victim of the environment and circumstance is a guarantee of moral and intellectual slavery.

From The Diary of a Writer by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Indeed, this is what the doctrine of environment contends in opposition to Christianity which, fully recognizing the pressure of the milieu, and which, having proclaimed mercy for him who has sinned, nevertheless makes it a moral duty for man to struggle against environment, and draws a line of demarcation between where environment ends and duty begins.  Making man responsible, Christianity eo ipso also recognizes his freedom.  However, making man dependent on any error in the social organization, the environ­mental doctrine reduces man to absolute impersonality, to a total emancipation from all personal moral duty, from all independence; reduces him to a state of the most miserable slavery that can be conceived.

I can't say that I have ever been a particular fan of Russian fiction.  However, that sits within the larger category of Not a fan of fiction.  

But I really like the observation here by Dostoevsky.  The choice of duty makes you free while choosing to be a victim of the environment and circumstance is a guarantee of moral and intellectual slavery.  At least worth debating but there is an appeal to the assertion.