You might find it interesting to read the links. Or at least the blockquotes. He took no credit but that which was offered, and that was taken with grace. Even humility.

Sharp says he hasn't been directly in touch with anyone in Egypt since the uprising began late last month. But he says he is happy to know that his ideas may have had some influence.

"I'm very pleased," he says. "I've been studying this question of dictatorships for many decades. It is a lonely struggle. To get this kind of recognition is very important."

His influence in Egypt and Tunisia has been referenced not by him, but by the participants and organizers themselves.
The quotes I did are a sample of many similar.

There is, among the deeply self-important, a powerful tendency to piss on anything done by a competing authority or competitor in an often self-perceived game of influence.
To suggest that an 83-year old has no right to admiration because he only supplied the ideas and
none of the blood is, it seems to me, quite unfair.


Capitalism searches out the darkest corners of human potential, and mainlines them.