Pythonic way to access arbitrary element from dictionary

Avoiding the whole values/itervalues/viewvalues mess, this works equally well in Python2 or Python3

dictionary[next(iter(dictionary))]

alternatively if you prefer generator expressions

next(dictionary[x] for x in dictionary)

Similar to your second solution, but slightly more obvious, in my opinion:

return next(iter(dictionary.values()))

This works in python 2 as well as in python 3, but in python 2 it's more efficient to do it like this:

return next(dictionary.itervalues())