Plato: For the greater good.
Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.
Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian virtue? In such a manner is the princely chicken’s dominion maintained.
Hippocrates: Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas.
Jacques Derrida: Any number of contending discourses may be discovered within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because structuralism is DEAD, DAMMIT, DEAD!
Timothy Leary: Because that’s the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take.
Douglas Adams: Forty-two.
Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you.
B.F. Skinner: Because the external influences which had pervaded its sensorium from birth had caused it to develop in such a fashion that it would tend to cross roads, even while believing these actions to be of its own free will.
Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being.
Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (Early): The possibility of “crossing” was encoded into the objects “chicken” and “road”, and circumstances came into being which caused the actualization of this potential occurrence.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (Late): Because it had reached bedrock, and its spade was turned.
Aristotle: To actualize its potential.
Salvador Dali: The Fish.
Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.
Epicurus: For fun.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn’t cross the road; it transcended it.
Johann Friedrich von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.
Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.
Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.
David Hume: Out of custom and habit.
Saddam Hussein: This was an unprovoked act of rebellion and we were quite justified in dropping 50 tons of nerve gas on it.
Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?
The Sphinx: You tell me.
Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately … and suck all the marrow out of life.
Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.
Molly Yard: It was a hen!
Gene Roddenberry: To boldly go where no chicken …
Zeno of Elea: To prove it could never reach the other side.
