"The Greatest Love of All" is a song written by composers Michael Masser (music) and Linda Creed (lyrics). It was originally recorded in 1977 by American singer and guitarist George Benson, who made the song a substantial hit, peaking at #2 on the R&B chart that year, the first R&B chart Top Ten hit for Arista Records. In 1981, Lea Salonga released her version of the song in her album Tomorrow: Little Miss Lea Salonga, Vol. 2 when she was about 9 or 10 years old. Four years later, the song became even more well known for a version by Whitney Houston, whose 1985 cover (with the slightly amended title "Greatest Love of All") eventually topped the charts, peaking at #1 in Australia, Canada and the U.S. in 1986, reaching #1 on the R&B chart, also by Arista Records.

"The Greatest Love of All" was written as the main theme of the 1977 film "The Greatest", a biopic of Muhammad Ali. Michael Masser wrote the music; he was later accused by Gordon Lightfoot of plagiarizing 24 bars of his 1971 hit "If You Could Read My Mind". (Specifically, the part of the song that begins "I decided long ago..." bears a marked compositional similarity to Lightfoot's passage in "If You Could Read My Mind" that begins "I never thought I could feel this way...") Lightfoot eventually dropped the suit out of respect for singer Whitney Houston.

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