Daily Inspiration Quote by Xun Kuang

Xun Kuang (Xunzi) is picking a fight with the feel-good idea that people arrive morally preloaded. “A person is born with a liking for profit” is blunt on purpose: it takes the everyday itch for advantage - more food, more security, more status - and treats it as the baseline setting of human nature, not a corruption that creeps in later. The provocation isn’t that profit is uniquely evil; it’s that desire is automatic, and left to run unchecked it reliably produces conflict. If everyone “likes” profit, then scarcity turns neighbors into rivals and politics into a scramble.

The subtext is pragmatic, almost administrative. Xunzi isn’t condemning commerce so much as diagnosing social mechanics: people will pursue what benefits them unless something trains, channels, and restrains that pursuit. That “something” is his great theme - ritual, education, and deliberate cultivation. Where Mencius insists humans are innately inclined toward goodness, Xunzi flips it: goodness is an achievement, a technology. You don’t discover virtue inside yourself; you build it through institutions.

Context matters: late Warring States China was a laboratory of statecraft, with rulers competing for power and thinkers offering blueprints for order. Talk of “profit” wasn’t abstract; it was the language of policy, agriculture, taxation, and military reward. Xunzi’s line works because it’s unsentimental and legible to anyone who has watched incentives bend behavior. It’s less a dark verdict on humanity than a warning label: design your society for the people you actually have, not the people you wish you had.