See many a famous answers to the most essential question ever asked.

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 black bile and a deficiency of choleric humour.

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!

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.

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: 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.

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

Aristotle: To actualize its potential.

Gautama Siddharta (Buddha): If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.

David Hume: Out of custom and habit.

Salvador Dalí: The Fish.

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

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 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.

Jack Nicholson: 'Cause it (censored) wanted to. That's the (censored) reason.

Pyrrho the Skeptic: What Road?

The Sphinx: You tell me.

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

Howard Cosell: It may very well have been one of the most astonishing events to grace the annals of history. An historic, unprecedented avian biped with the temerity to attempt such an herculean achievement formerly relegated to homo sapien pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurence.

Ronald Reagan: I forget.

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

Zeno of Elea: To prove it could never reach the other side.

Oliver North: National security was at stake.

Saddam Hussein: This was an unprovoked act of rebellion and we were quite justified in dropping 50 tons of nerve gas on it.

John Sununu: The Air Force was only too happy to provide the transportation, so quite understandably the chicken availed himself of the opportunity.

Jane Austen: Because it is truth universally acknowledged that a single chicken, being possessed of a good fortune and presented with a good road.

Neil Armstrong: One small step for chickenkind, one giant leap for poultry.

Lord Baden Powell: Because as a Chicken Scout, it needed the Road-Crossing Merit Badge.

Baldrick: It had a cunning plan.

Roseann Barr: Urrrrp. What chicken???

George Bush: If it did, it was out of the loop...

Rhett Butler: Frankly my dear, it didn't give a damn.

Julius Caesar: It came, it saw, it crossed.

Joseph Campbell: In primitive cultures, we can find many such examples if the chicken motif that cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence. For instance, I am reminded of an old Navajo legend in which a buffalo crosses a stream to come to the other side - - - an obvious negative language devised to prepare tribesmen for a transcendental experience. Similarly, the Hindus believed in savanaya, or a sacred cow that leaps over a chasm on Thursdays. Through metaphorical intepretation, we are lead to realize that all examples suggest an attainable higher state of consciousness like that of Nietzsche's Übermensch, or superman, as outlined in his novel "THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA".

Noam Chomsky: To manufacture consent.

Tom Clancy: The Mark 84 Gargleblaster that the chicken carried, at the heart of which was an inferior ex-Soviet excimer laser system, had insufficient range to allow the chicken to carry out its mission from this side of the road.

Bill Clinton: The chicken was persuaded to cross the road by the democratic congress. It is now returning to the middle road...

John Cleese: This Chicken was no more. It has ceased to function. Bereft of life, it rests in peace.
It's a stiff. If it wasn't nailed to the road, it'd be pushing up daises. It's snuffed it. It's metabolic processes are now history. It's bleeding demised. It's rung down the curtain, shuffled off the mortal coil and joined the bleeding Choir Invisible. This is an Ex-Chicken.

René Descartes: The chicken was merely a machine and was crossing due to the deterministic nature of the universe.

Gerald R. Ford: It probably fell from an airplane and couldn't stop its forward momentum.

Sigmund Freud: The chicken was obviously a female and obviously interpreted the pole on which the crosswalk sign was mounted as a phallic symbol of which she was envious, selbstverständlich.

Newt Gingrich: To get to the RIGHT side of the road.

Ira Glasser: The chicken maintains an absolute privacy interest in information as to whether or why he or she may have perambulated the thoroughfare.

Fox Mulder: You saw it cross the road with your own eyes. How many more chickens have to cross the road before you believe it?

Dana Scully: It was a simple bio-mechanical reflex that is commonly found in chickens.

Richard M. Nixon: The chicken did not cross the road. I repeat, the chicken did not cross the road.

Jerry Seinfeld: Why does anyone cross a road? I mean, why doesn't anyone ever think to ask, "What the heck was this chicken doing walking around all over the place anyway?"

Oliver Stone: The question is not "Why did the chicken cross the road? But is rather, "Who was crossing the road at the same time, whom we overlooked in our haste to observe the chicken crossing?"

Louis Farrakhan: The road, you will see, represents the black man. The chicken crossed the "black man" in order to trample him and keep him down.

Martin Luther King: I envision a world where all chickens will be free to cross roads without having their motives called into question.

Grandpa: In my day, we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Someone told us that the chicken had crossed the road, and that was good enough for us.

Pat Buchanan: To steal a job from a decent, hard-working American.

The Bible: And God came down from the heavens, and He said unto the chicken, "Thou shalt cross the road." And the Chicken crossed the road, and there was much rejoicing.

O. J. Simpson: It didn't. I was playing golf with the chicken at the time.

Mr. Spock: The question is most illogical. I fail to see why any rational being would take the time and energy necessary to ponder this question.

James T. Kirk: To boldly go where no chicken has gone before.

Dr. McCoy: How should I know? Damnit Jim, I'm a Doctor not an ornithologist!

Worf: The chicken had to cross the road to avoid shame. It would be dishonorable for it to remain when it could confront life like a warrior.

T. S. Elliot: It's not that they cross, but that they cross like chickens.

Hamlet: Because 'tis better to suffer in the mind the slings and arrows of outrageous road of maintenance than to take arms against a sea of oncoming vehicles.

Thomas Hardy: The road was black and the sky was white, and so were the feathers, as the bright red mark on the top of the chicken's head gleamed in the twilight. It was a pure chicken and it was DOOMED.

Franz Kafka: Dieter, now in the form of chicken, was running from the government torture machine. The machine, an instrument of death, slowly obliterated the souls of its victims. Dieter was alone. He was running for his life, his insignificant life.

H. P. Lovecraft: To futilely attempt escape from the dark powers which even then pursued it, hungering after the stuff of its soul!

Ilya Prigogine: Because the road was in unstable equilibrium.

Vladimir I. Lenin: Roads are the opium for the poultry!

Georg W. F. Hegel: Only through the synthesis of the dialectical chicken and road could the spirit transcend the experience of crossing.

Karl R. Popper: It falsified the hypothesis that it could cross the road.

John Locke: Because he was exercising his natural right to liberty.

Albert Camus: It doesn't matter; the chicken's actions have no meaning except to him.

Immanuel Kant: The pure transcendental concept of the road, having been deduced a priori and without dependence on intuitions, is given in the mode of the chicken as an end in itself, while crossing the road as a hypothetical imperative, namely, as acting towards some end allowed by Reason.

M. C. Escher: That depends on which plane of reality the chicken was on at the time.

George Orwell: Because the government had fooled him into thinking that he was crossing the road of his own free will, when he was really only serving their interests.

Stephen Jay Gould: It is possible that there is a sociobiological explanation for it, but we have been deluged in recent years with sociobiological stories despite the fact that we have little direct evidence about the genetics of behavior, and we do not know how to obtain it for the specific behaviors that figure most prominently in sociobiological speculation.

Erwin Schrödinger: Chicken? Chicken!? Where's my cat?

Frank Perdue: I breed the finest chicken I know how, and it crosses the road as part of a vigorous fitness program to raise the leanest, plumpest birds anywhere. Besides, I was chasing it with this axe at the time.

Forest Gump: Because Chickens are like that sometimes, and Mama always said, chickens are like that, sometimes.

Steven Segal: That doesn't matter now, we have to get her back here safe and sound, and kill as many people necessary, creating as many incredible explosions, and damaging as much property as spectacularly as possible.

Joseph Stalin: It was clearly a conspiracy. Take all the chickens out and shoot them. At Once!

Colonel Sanders: I missed one?

Marcus Antonius: The evil that chickens do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.

Arthur, King of the Britons: What do you mean? African or European chickens?

Paul Atreides: What name have you for the chicken shaped stain upon your road? That shall be the name that you shall call me!

Clive Barker: He was drawn to the road, and he didn't so much cross the road as the road crossed him. And once across, the chicken entered into a frightening void, filled only with the screams of a thousand agonized souls. The hands of doom reached out of the blackness, strangling the chicken, smothering him, suffocating him. He could not escape, as no one who crosses the road can escape. He was now a prisoner of the Cenobytes, doomed to an eternity of pain.

The Beatles: To be free as a bird!

Lavrenti Berija: This is a State Secret -- we have informants everywhere.

Candide: To cultivate its garden.

John Constantine: Because it'd made a bollocks of things over on this side of the road and figured it'd better get out right quick.

Bob Dylan: How many roads must a chicken travel down, before they call him a man?

Wyatt Earp: Well, chicken, are you gonna do something, or just stand there and bleed?

Sören Kirkegaard: The chicken is dead. The road is nothing.

Leibniz: In this best possible world, the road was made for it to cross.

David Letterman: And the No. 1 reason - fricasee!

George Lucas: Because the force was with it.

Groucho Marx: Chicken? What's all this talk about chicken? Why, I had an uncle who thought he was a chicken. My aunt almost divorced him, but we needed the eggs.

Perry Mason: Cross the road you say? But how can you be sure? No one else would have known the chicken crossed the road except for the real killer!

Gregor Mendel: To get various strains of roads.

John Milton: To justify the ways of God to men.

Jim Morrison: To break on through to the other side, I am the chicken king

Isaac Newton: Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest. Chickens in motion tend to cross the road.

Wolfgang Pauli: There already was a chicken on the other side of the road.

Elvis Presley: You aint nothin' but a chicken, crossin' all the roads!

Monty Python: For something completely different

The Red Queen: Who cares? Off with it's head!

The White Rabbit: It was late.

Macbeth: If it were done, when 'tis done, then 'twere well
It were done quickly: if the crossing
Could scoot across the dotted line, and catch,
Beyond passing car, sidewalk; that but these feathers
Might be the be-all and end-all here,
But here, at this corner of street and avenue,
We'd cross at the light to come.

Sisyphus: Was it pushing a rock, too?

Socrates: To pick up some hemlock at the corner druggist.

John Steinbeck: The road baked in the relentless summer sun as the chicken, looking about, began to cross. It stopped occasionally to peck at a grass seed that had become lodged in a crevice in the cracked macadam. The chicken reached the other side, then began making his way to the Salinas, which lay muddy and turgid in the July afternoon, all the while thinking of the cool shade by the river and how good the can of beans in his bedroll would taste tonight.

Darth Vader: Because it could not resist the power of the Dark Side.

Mae West: 'Cause I invited it to come up and see me sometime.

George Washington: I cannot tell a lie. I was going to chop it with my little axe, so it crossed the road.

Sarah Peterson: To get to the Miguel Bosé look-alike.

Ernst Mayer: To find the unspecialized archetype.

George W. Bush: We don't really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road or not. The chicken is either against us or for us. There is no middle ground here.

Colin Powell: Now to the left of the screen, you can clearly see the satellite image of the chicken crossing the road.

Hans Blix: We have reason to believe there is a chicken, but we have not yet been allowed to have access to the other
side of the road.

John Kerry: Although I voted to let the chicken cross the road I am now against it!

Ralph Nader: The chicken's habitat on the other side of the road had been polluted by unchecked industrial greed. The
chicken did not reach the unspoiled habitat on the other side of the road because it was crushed by the wheels of a gas-guzzling SUV.

Rush Limbaugh: I don't know why the chicken crossed the road, but I'll bet it was getting a government grant to cross the road, and I'll bet that somebody out there is already forming
a support group to help chickens with crossing-the-road syndrome. Can you believe this? How much more of this can real Americans take? Chickens crossing the road paid for by their tax dollars. And when I say tax dollars, I'm talking about your money, money the government took from you to build a road for chickens to cross.

Martha Stewart: No one called me to warn me which way that chicken was going. I had a standing order at the Farmer's
Market to sell my eggs when the price dropped to a certain level. No little bird gave me any insider information.

Jerry Falwell: Because the chicken was gay --- isn't it obvious? Can't you people see the plain truth in front of your face? The chicken was going to the 'other side'. That's what they call it, "the other side." Yes, my friends, that chicken is gay. And if you eat that chicken, you will become gay too. I say we boycott all chickens until we sort out this abomination that the liberal media whitewashes with seemingly harmless phrases like "the other side."

Dr. Seuss: Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed I've not been told.