http://www.strauss.za.com/sla/chick_20020221.html Adolf Hitler: He needed lebensraum. (Jaco Strauss) Albert Einstein: It is a question about relativity. Did the chicken really cross the road or did the road move beneath the chicken? Whether the chicken crossed the road, or the road crossed the chicken, depends upon your frame of reference. Aristotle: To actualize its potential. Ayn Rand: Because as a thinking, independent being he had the will, the freedom and the ability to do so. (Jaco Strauss) 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. Bill Clinton: He probably spotted a cute little hen. (Jaco Strauss) Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature. 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. 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. George W Bush: He selflessly faced the dangers of road crossing in order to liberate the less fortunate chickens on the other side of the road. (Jaco Strauss) Grandpa: In my day, we didn't ask why the chicken crossed the road. Someone told us that the chicken crossed the road, and that was good enough for us. And that chicken would have had to walk barefoot five miles in the snow just to get to that road too! They just don't make them like that anymore! 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. Johann Friedrich von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it. John Sununu: The Air Force was only too happy to provide the transportation, so quite understandably the chicken availed himself of the opportunity. 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 actualization 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. Molly Yard: It was a hen! Friedrich Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you. Osama bin Laden: To strike at the heart of the infidels. Praise be to Alah! (Jaco Strauss) Plato: For the greater good. Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road? Was there a chicken? Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it. Robber Mugabe: To destroy the other side too as part of the decolonialisation process. (Jaco Strauss) Ronald Reagan: I forget. Schopenhauer: Because of his will. Just as the will of the earth, manifested in gravity, facilitated the journey. (Jaco Strauss) Sigmund Freud: As an expression of the repressed desire to have sex with its mother. The road symbolizes the barrier presented by the cultural taboo. Sun Tsu: It was a tactical retreat to enable the chicken to cross back and fight another day. (Jaco Strauss) Thabo Mbeki: It is Apartheid's fault. (Jaco Strauss) 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. Tony Blair: Because it is the right thing to do. (Jaco Strauss) 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. Good chance none of you will find this funny, feel free to add your own.