Source: Qing Gu Yanwu's Shame.

Selected paragraph:

Mencius said, "One should not be shameless. Shameless, shameless. " He also said, "The shame of the National People's Congress. Those who change their opportunities wisely have no shame. " Therefore, people are not cheap, and as for violating etiquette and committing righteousness, they are shameless. Therefore, the shamelessness of scholar-officials is a national shame.

Translation:

Mencius said: "People can't be shameless, they can be ashamed of being shameless, so they can be shameless." He added: "Shame has a lot to do with people. Those who engage in intrigue are not ashamed at all. " This is because a person is dishonest and even violates etiquette and justice, and it is inferred that the reason is shameless. Therefore, the shamelessness of the literati can be described as a national shame.

Extended data:

This paper takes Feng Dao as the starting point and takes honesty and shame as the basis of courtesy, righteousness and honesty. This man is the minister of the country. Gu took his argument to the extreme and showed its accuracy in a gradual way. The shamelessness of the courtiers is not ordinary shamelessness, but "national humiliation".

Gu's warning has been profound, but the deduction and deduction of his thoughts have not stopped. In order to deepen to a new level, Gu's vision changed from * * * to diachronic, and analyzed contradictions from the perspective of historical development. On the one hand, since the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties, the world has gone from bad to worse, and people's hearts are not ancient. On the other hand, there are people who are drunk and "wake up alone".

For such an outstanding figure, Gu first used a double negative ("nothing") in syntax to imply its rarity, and used a lot of pen and ink and two allusions in rhetoric to describe it, which was both classic and full of image sensibility.