Cultural Differences
Culturally, the adage contrasts with that of the Japanese proverb, "The stake that sticks up gets hammered down", or "The nail that stands out gets pounded down," illustrating cultural differences between the West and East. However, a sentiment similar to the Japanese focus on modesty and humility is also reflected in the idea of tall poppy syndrome, which is popular in commonwealth countries.
Read more about this topic: Squeaky Wheel
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or differences:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“I may be able to spot arrowheads on the desert but a refrigerator is a jungle in which I am easily lost. My wife, however, will unerringly point out that the cheese or the leftover roast is hiding right in front of my eyes. Hundreds of such experiences convince me that men and women often inhabit quite different visual worlds. These are differences which cannot be attributed to variations in visual acuity. Man and women simply have learned to use their eyes in very different ways.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)