The chicken and the road

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Answer from…

Albert Einstein

Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.

Aristotle

To actualise its potential.

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.

Buddha

If you meet the chicken on the road, kill it.

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.

Charles Darwin

It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.

David Hume

Out of custom and habit.

Douglas Adams

Forty-two.

Emily Dickinson

Because it could not stop for death.

Epicurus

For fun.

Ernest Hemingway

To die. In the rain.

Henry David Thoreau

To live deliberately… and suck all the marrow out of life.

Hippocrates

Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas.

Jack Nicholson

Cause it [censored] wanted to. That’s the [censored] reason.

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!

Jean-Paul Sartre

In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.

J.W. von Goethe

The eternal hen-principle made it do it.

Karl Marx

It was a historical inevitability.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The possibility of “crossing” was encoded into the objects “chicken” and “road”, and circumstances came into being which caused the actualisation of this potential occurrence.

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.

Mark Twain

The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Because if you gaze too long across the road, the road gazes also across you.

Plato

For the greater good.

Pyrrho the Skeptic

What road?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It didn’t cross the road; it transcended it.

Salvador Dali

The Fish.

The Sphinx

You tell me.

Thomas de Torquemada

Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I’ll find out.

Timothy Leary

Because that’s the only kind of trip the establishment would let it take.

Werner Heisenberg

We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.

Zeno of Elea

To prove it could never reach the other side.