Quote by Mencius: “The great man is he who does not lose his child's heart.”

Children approach the world with openness, genuine feeling, and moral instinct before it is trained out of them. Mencius believed that moral goodness is not something we acquire — it is something we are born with and must fight to preserve against the corrupting pressures of ambition and social performance.

Mencius taught and debated during the Warring States period of Chinese history, when seven major kingdoms competed for dominance through constant warfare. He traveled between royal courts advocating for benevolent governance, often in direct opposition to rulers who preferred Legalist strategies of control through punishment and incentive.

Chinese Confucian philosopher of the fourth century BCE, often called the Second Sage of Confucianism after Confucius himself. His collected conversations, the Mengzi, argued that human nature is fundamentally good and that benevolent government is both a moral and a practical necessity. He traveled across the warring states advocating for humane kingship.