Friday Riddle

Hatshepsut said:

For the history and English majors (or lovers) on this board....

These (and a lot more) responses have been around for a very long time. The Machiavelli answer and the Swift answer always make me smile. Of course, these answers can't hold a candle to the Gregory Peck line.

Hatshepsut

WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?


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 light pink gooey stuff in its
pancreas.

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.

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.


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

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


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

Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.


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


Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.


The Sphinx: You tell me.


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


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.

Hamlet: That is not the question.

Donne: It crosseth for thee.