I actually got the first of these a very long time ago, and the other just yesterday...

famous people's answers to a very famous question


Why did the chicken cross the road?

Aristotle: To actualize its potential.

Roseanne Barr: Urrrrrp. What chicken?

Roland Barthes: The chicken wanted to expose the myth of the road.

Wolfgang von Beethoven: What? Speak up.

Bill the Cat: Oop Ack. Ppthpt.

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

George Bush: To face a kinder, gentler thousand points of headlights.

Caesar: To come, to see, to conquer.

Candide: To cultivate its garden.

Joseph Conrad: Mistah Chicken, he dead.

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 occurrence.

Salvador Dali: The fish.

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

Thomas Dequincy: Because it ran out of opium.

Rene Descartes: It had sufficient reason to believe it was dreaming anyway.

Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.

Bob Dylan: How many roads must one chicken cross?

Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.

Epicurus: For fun.

Paul Erdos: It was forced to do so by the chicken-hole principle.

Basil Fawlty: Oh, don't mind that chicken. It's from Barcelona.

Pierre de Fermat: I just don't have room here to give the full explanation.

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

Michel Foucault: It did so because the dicourse of crossing the road left it no choice; the police state was oppressing it.

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

Robert Frost: To cross the road less traveled by.

Zsa Zsa Gabor: It probably crossed to get a better look at my legs, which, thank goodness, are good, dahling.

Gilligan: The traffic started getting rough; the chicken had to cross. If not for the plumage of its peerless tail, the chicken would be lost. The chicken would be lost!

Johann Friedrich von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.

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

Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.

David Hume: Out of custom and habit.

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

Lee Iacocca: It found a better car, which was on the other side of the road.

John Paul Jones: It has not yet begun to cross!

James Joyce: Once upon a time, a nicens little chicken named baby tuckoo crossed the road and met a moocow coming down...

Immanuel Kant: Because it was a duty.

Jacques Lacan: Because of its desire for *object a*.

H. P. Lovecraft: To escape the eldritch, cthonic, rugose, polypous, indescribably horrible abomination not from our space-time continuum.

Paul de Man: The chicken did not really cross the road because one side and the other are not really opposites in the first place.

Paul de Man (uncovered after his death): So no one would find out it wrote for a collaborationist Belgian newspaper during the early years of World War II.

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.

Karl Marx: To escape the bourgeois middle-class struggle.

Moses: Know ye that it is unclean to eat the chicken that has crossed the road, and that the chicken that crosseth the road doth so for its own preservation.

Alfred E. Neumann: What? Me worry?

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

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

J. Danforth Quayle: Ite sawe ae potatoee.

Ronald Reagan: Well, I forget.

William Shakespeare: I don't know why, but methinks I could rattle off a hundred-line soliloquy without much ado.

Sisyphus: Was it pushing a rock, too?

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

The Sphinx: You tell me.

Mr. T: If you saw me coming, you'd cross the road too!

Margaret Thatcher: There was no alternative.

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

George Washington: Actually, it crossed the Delaware with me back in 1776. But most history books don't reveal that I bunked with a birdie during the duration.

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

Walt Whitman: To cluck the song of itself.


Why did the chicken cross the road?

MOSES: And God came down from the Heavens, and He said unto the Chicken, "Thous shalt cross the road." And the chicken crossed the road, and there was much rejoicing.

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

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?"

FREUD: The fact that you are at all concerned that the chicken crossed the road reveals your underlying sexual insecurity.

BILL GATES: I have just released the new Chicken Office 2000, which will not only cross roads, but will lay eggs, file your important documents, and balance your checkbook.

OLIVER STONE: The question is not, "Why did the chicken cross the road?" Rather, it is, "Who was crossing the road at the same time, whom we overlooked in our haste to observe the chicken crossing?"

DARWIN: Chickens, over great periods of time, have been naturally selected in such a way that they are now genetically dispositioned to cross roads.

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, JR.: 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.

MACHIAVELLI: The point is that the chicken crossed the road. Who cares why? The end of crossing the road justifies whatever motive there was.

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

BUDDHA: Asking this question denies your own chicken nature.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON: The chicken did not cross the road; it transcended it.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: To die. In the rain.

COLONEL SANDERS: I missed one?


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