Oh, the things that we find online…
Hamlet: That is not the question.
Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.
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.
Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you.
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.
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.
Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately … and suck all the marrow out of life.
Blake: To see heaven in a wild fowl.
Othello: Jealousy.
Oscar Wilde: Why, indeed? One’s social engagements whilst in town ought never expose one to such barbarous inconvenience – although, perhaps, if one must cross a road, one may do far worse than to cross it as the chicken in question.
Kafka: Hardly the most urgent enquiry to make of a low-grade insurance clerk who woke up that morning as a hen.
Swift: It is, of course, inevitable that such a loathsome, filth-ridden and degraded creature as Man should assume to question the actions of one in all respects his superior.
Macbeth: To have turned back were as tedious as to go o’er.
Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.
Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.