Love Quote by Xun Kuang

Xun Kuang (Xunzi) doesn’t flatter his audience with faith in spontaneous goodness; he corners them with a bleak diagnosis that doubles as a political argument. The line opens like an observation about appetite - “born with a love of profit” - then tightens into a causal chain: indulge the impulse and society doesn’t merely get a little selfish, it becomes structurally competitive. “Struggle and snatch” is doing heavy work here. It’s not poetic decoration; it’s an anthropology of scarcity where desire escalates into conflict as a default setting, not a moral anomaly.

The subtext is a warning aimed at rulers and moralists who think virtue will emerge naturally if you just get out of the way. Xunzi is staking out a deliberate contrast with the Mencian view that humans are innately good. For him, “inclinations to defer or yield” aren’t crushed by a few bad actors; they “die” when left unsupported. That verb is ruthless: civility is not self-sustaining, it’s a fragile habit that requires cultivation, reinforcement, and ritual scaffolding.

Context matters. Writing in the Warring States period, Xunzi is surrounded by states competing for survival, talent, grain, territory - the very ecosystem that turns “profit” into a civic religion. His point isn’t that humans are uniquely wicked; it’s that order is an achievement, not a birthright. The quote functions like a manifesto for institutions: rites, law, education, and norms aren’t ornamental. They are the technologies that keep “snatching” from becoming the political baseline.