1.
The feasant hens of Colchis, which have two ears as it were consisting of feathers, which they will set up and lay down as they list.
Pliny the Elder
4.
Gentleness doesn't get work done unless you happen to be a hen laying eggs.
Coco Chanel
5.
When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.
Katherine Dunn
6.
While farmers generally allow one rooster for ten hens, ten men are scarcely sufficient to service one woman.
Giovanni Boccaccio
7.
People in Washington seem as hypnotized by precedence as though they were hens with their beaks on a chalk line.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth
8.
It strikes me that all our knowledge about the structure of our Earth is very much like what an old hen would know of the hundred-acre field in a corner of which she is scratching.
Charles Darwin
9.
They say that hens do cackle loudest when there is nothing vital in the eggs they have laid.
Ambrose Bierce
10.
Be bold and boast, just like the cock beside the hen.
Aeschylus
11.
The argument about zoning and the presidency of Nigeria is like the philosophical argument of the egg or the hen. Who is older through the evolutionary process, who came first?
Goodluck Jonathan
14.
The crows may crow, but the hens deliver the goods.
Steven Tyler
16.
Gipsies, who every ill can cure,
Except the ill of being poor
Who charms 'gainst love and agues sell,
Who can in hen-roost set a spell,
Prepar'd by arts, to them best known
To catch all feet except their own,
Who, as to fortune, can unlock it,
As easily as pick a pocket.
Charles Churchill
17.
[W]hen the empirical investigator glories in his refusal to go beyond the specialized observation dictated by the traditions of his discipline, be they ever so inclusive, he is making a virtue out of a defense mechanism which insures him against questioning his presuppositions.
Karl Mannheim
18.
A Royal Commission is a broody hen sitting on a china egg.
Michael Foot
19.
The apples stewed with prunes are excellent, except for the prunes, I won't eat prunes myself. Well, there was one time when Hobb chopped them up with chesnuts and carrots and hid them in a hen. Never trust a cook, my lord. They'll prune you when you least expect it.
George R. R. Martin
20.
When you let the wolves guard the hen house, there's bound to be a few chicken dinners.
James St. James
21.
You have the chicken, the hen, and the rooster. The chicken goes with the hen So who is having sex with the rooster?
William Carlos Williams
22.
[W]hen you align yourself exclusively with one party, and weaponize yourself in that party's cause, you're going to pay the price when the other party is in power. That's the price you pay for whoring yourself out.
Glenn Reynolds
23.
Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.
H. L. Mencken
24.
hen the price of carbon reaches $100 a tonne, then it will become an economically viable business proposition to start taking COâ‚‚ out of the atmosphere and sequestering it underground.
Thomas Homer-Dixon
25.
What's the meaning of all the pious clamor, condemning cocks and hens? Those who have no teeth are the greatest meat-haters.
Franz Grillparzer
26.
States organized for war will make war as surely as hens will lay eggs.
H. G. Wells
27.
To tell a woman not to talk too much was like telling Jesse James not to carry a gun, or a hen not to cackle.
Malcolm X
28.
Money is for doing things, my love. Don't sit on it like a hen sits on an egg. It doesn't hatch. I should know. I've made enough of it.
Maureen Johnson
29.
In our day there are no longer any ideas, or they are scarcer than hens' teeth.
Louis Aragon
30.
There is a patience that cackles. There are a great many virtues that are hen-like. They are virtue, to be sure; but everybody in the neighborhood has to know about them.
Henry Ward Beecher
31.
Progress? It ought to be stopped, that's what I say. If the Lord meant chickens to come out of incubators he'd never have made hens, it stands to reason.
Winifred Holtby
35.
Hen nights should be banned. You're honour-bound to behave atrociously, then feel terribly ashamed afterwards. (This Charming Man)
Marian Keyes
36.
Elizabeth, you resemble nothing so much as a hen trying to hatch a book.
Julia Quinn
38.
[W]hen the martyr's righteous forebrain is exploded by the executioner's bullet and his mind disintegrates, what then? Can we safely assume that all those millions of neural circuits will be reconstituted in an immaterial state, so the conscious mind carries on?
E. O. Wilson
39.
I was never any good at remembering dates, but now I hardly have to. When the first bulb catalogs get delivered and the hens start laying again, that's all the notice I'll need to know that winter has passed.
Susan Orlean
40.
Though the hen should sit all day, she could lay only one egg, and, besides, would not have picked up materials for another.
Henry David Thoreau