Superficial.

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.
• Douglas Adams: Forty-two.
• Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you.
• Oliver North: National Security was at stake.
• 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.
• Samuel Beckett: It got tired of waiting.
• Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.
• Albert Camus: The gods had commanded it to cross and recross the road.
• Winston Churchill: It was moving into broad sunlit uplands...
• 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 sapiens pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurence.
• Salvador Dali: The Fish.
• Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.
• Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.
• Conan Doyle: It is quite a three-pipe problem, Watson.
• T. S. Eliot: To examine the wasteland for worms.
• Epicurus: For fun.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.
• Richard Feynman: Surely it was joking.
• Johann Wolfgang 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.
• 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.
• George Mallory: Because it was there.
• Jack Nicholson: 'Cause it (censored) wanted to. That's the (censored) reason.
• Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?
• Ronald Reagan: I forget.
• John Sununu: The Air Force was only too happy to provide the transportation, so quite understandably the chicken availed himself of the opportunity.
• The Sphinx: You tell me.
• Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately ... and suck all the marrow out of life.
• Charles Dickens: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, chicken were crossing roads, chicken were staying behind...
• Orwell: All roads are crossable by all chicken, but some roads are more crossable than others.
• Dostoyevsky: After having killed an old hen, the chicken was wandering deliriously along the empty night streets of St. Petersburg and waiting for the darkness that never came; he crossed Nevsky and after a while found himself in an unfamiliar part of the city.
• Ecclesiast: There are times for the chicken to cross roads and there are times to stay at the roadside.
• Hamlet: For 'tis better to suffer in the mind the slings and arrows of outrageous road maintenance than to take arms against a sea of oncoming vehicles...
• J. R. R. Tolkein: The chicken, sunlight coruscating off its radiant yellow-white coat of feathers, approached the dark, sullen asphalt road and scrutinized it intently with its obsidian-black eyes. Every detail of the thoroughfare leapt into blinding focus: the rough texture of the surface, over which count-less tires had worked their relentless tread through the ages; the innumerable fragments of stone embedded within the lugubrious mass, perhaps quarried from the great pits where the Sons of Man labored not far from here; the dull black asphalt itself, exuding those waves of heat which distort the sight and bring weakness to the body; the other attributes of the great highway too numerous to give name. And then it crossed it.
• Dorothy Parker: Travel, trouble, music, art / A kiss, a frock, a rhyme /The chicken never said they fed its heart / But still they pass its time.
• Edgar Allan Poe: Never More.