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Text of Governor Bush's Remarks at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles

It is a special honor to be with you today, and to visit this place of remembrance and hope and vigilance. Here we remember the past - including its crimes and cruelties. Here, we imagine the future as a place where intolerance and hatred have no place in the policies of government, or the souls of citizens.

I am pleased to be with friends of the Wiesenthal Center - people committed to the spread of justice and tolerance and people dedicated to a safe and secure Israel. I join you in this important cause.

All of you are supporting a great work. For more than a generation now, the Wiesenthal Center has fought against anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry. Not just here, but around the world.

More than 50 years ago, a member of the Nazi SS told Simon Wiesenthal that it wasn't worth telling the story of the death camps - because no one would ever believe such things were possible. Yet now we do not just believe, now we know. We know because Simon Wiesenthal and many others have preserved truths that must never be lost to memory, or sacrificed to revisionism.

Our century has revealed both the durability of human hate, and the durability of human hope. In the Holocaust, we saw unending hate and undying hope. Anti-Semitism once destroyed the moral foundations of one of the most educated nations on earth. It is a fact that barbarism can appear even in the most outwardly civilized society. Tolerance can never be assumed. It must always be taught.