Xunzi

Xunzi (circa 300 to 230 BCE) was a Chinese philosopher of the late Warring States period and, with Mencius, one of the two most influential early interpreters of Confucianism. He held that human nature is originally self-interested and becomes good only through deliberate ritual, education and law, comparing moral cultivation to straightening crooked wood on a shaping frame, a more pessimistic account of human nature than Mencius's that later influenced the rival school of Legalism through his student Han Feizi.