Quote by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: “We have made you neither heavenly nor earthly, so that you might freely make yourself.”

God, in Pico's vision, did not give humans a fixed nature the way he gave it to animals or angels. Instead, humans were given the freedom to become whatever they choose through their own effort and will. This is one of the earliest and most powerful arguments for human self-determination.

Pico wrote the Oration at the age of twenty-three, intended as the preface to a great public debate in Rome that Pope Innocent VIII suppressed before it could take place. The text circulated in manuscript and became one of the defining documents of Renaissance humanism.

Italian Renaissance philosopher best known for his Oration on the Dignity of Man, written in 1486 as a preface to his nine hundred theses and often called the manifesto of the Renaissance. He synthesised classical philosophy, Christian theology, and Jewish Kabbalah in a bold vision of human potential.