Scavenger

I had monuments made of bronze, lapis lazuli, alabaster and white limestone and inscriptions of baked clay… and I deposited them in the foundations and left them for future times.

— ESARHADDON, King of Assyria

Seventh Century, B.C.

I had an assignment the other day. Someone asked me to write a letter for a time capsule that was going to be opened in Los Angeles a hundred years from now… It sounded like an easy assignment. They suggested I write something about the problems and issues of the day, and I set out to do so, riding down the coast in an automobile, looking at the blue Pacific out on one side and the Santa Ynez Mountains on the other, and I couldn’t help but wonder if it was going to be that beautiful a hundred years from now as it was on that summer day. And then, as I tried to write… let your minds turn to that task. You’re going to write for people a hundred years from now who know all about us. We know nothing about them. We don’t know what kind of world they’ll be living in.

— RONALD REAGAN

from a speech at the 1976 Republican

National Convention after failing to receive

his party’s presidential nomination