Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

Douglas Adams: Forty-two

Aristotle: To actualize its potential.

Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.

Salvador Dali: The Fish.

Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road moved beneath the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.

Emerson: The chicken didn’t cross the road; it transcended it.

Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.

Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.

Hemingway:To die. In the rain.

David Hume: Out of custom and habit.

Timothy Leary: Because that’s the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take.

John Lennon: Imagine all the chickens crossing roads in peace.

Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.

Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you.

Plato: For the greater good.

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

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

Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

Voltaire: I may not agree with what the chicken did, but I will defend to the death its right to do it.

Wittgenstein: 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.