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What book has had the greatest impact on world leaders throughout history? 

Answer: The Bible’s influence has extended all around the world throughout history. As a result, many great leaders and statesmen throughout history have had the greatest respect for the Bible. There are too many quotes to reproduce them all here, but I will give you a sample, with reference site attached.

“It is impossible to rightly govern without God and the Bible” (George Washington, thinkexist.com/quotes).

“The Bible is the Book of faith, and a Book of doctrine, and a Book of morals, and a Book of religion, of special revelation from God; but it is also a Book which teaches man his responsibility, his own dignity, and his equality with his fellow man” (Daniel Webster, June 17, 1843, speech at Bunker Hill Monument, Charlestown, MA, Burton Stevenson, the Home Book of Quotations, Classical and Modern, NY, Dodd, Mead and Co., 1967).

“Hold fast to the Bible as the steel anchor of our liberties; write its precepts on your heart and practise (sic.) them in your lives. To the influence of this book we are indebted for the progress made in true civilization, and to this we must look for our guide in the future” (Ulysses Grant, www.brainyquote.com).

“The Bible is no mere book, but a living creature, with a power that conquers all that oppose it” (Napoleon, thinkexist.com).

There are many such quotes throughout history and from many nations. Note that none of the above quotes is from clergymen or theologians.

Question: Has history shown that the above statements are valid? 

Answer: Evidence actually does exist for the high-sounding statements above. Again there is too much evidence to do the subject justice here, but I will give you some examples.

“When Charles Darwin first visited Tierra del Fuego, he found the inhabitants in a state of misery and moral degradation, but when he returned some years later, after the Bible had been introduced by missionaries, ‘The change for the better was so indescribable that he not only testified his astonishment but became a regular contributor to the missionary society.’”[1]

“Some years ago, Reader’s Digest carried a story titled ‘Shimabuku―the Village That Lives by the Bible.’ It told how an advance patrol of American troops liberating the island of Okinawa were approaching a particular village when they were confronted by two old men carrying a Bible. Suspicious of a trap, they called for the chaplain, who said he felt they could go on. Entering the village, they found it spotless, the fields tilled and fertile, and everything a model of neatness and cleanliness―totally unlike the other run-down villages they had seen. They soon discovered the reason for this amazing contrast. Thirty years earlier an American missionary on his way to Japan had called at Shimabuku and stayed long enough to leave behind two men who had come to believe in God. He also left a Japanese Bible, which he urged them to study and live by. Without any other outside human help the community had gradually been transformed. There was no jail, no brothel, no drunkenness, no divorce, a high standard of health and a remarkable spirit of social unity and happiness. Clarence Hall, the war correspondent who wrote the story, quoted the words of his dumbfounded driver: ‘So this is what comes out of a Bible. . .Maybe we are using the wrong weapons to change the world!’”[2]