"Standing on the corner beside their parked motorcycles were three boys in leathers. They looked up at the cab and for a moment — the setting sun was almost full in her face from this angle — it seemed that the bikers did not have human heads at all. For that one moment she was nastily sure that the sleek heads of rats sat atop those black leather jackets, rats with black eyes staring at the cab. Then the light shifted just a tiny bit and she saw of course she had been mistaken; there were only three young men smoking cigarettes in front of the British version of the American candy store."
"You will be assigned to Blorch, home of the Slaughtering Rat People. Thank you."
— Almighty Tallest Red to Invader Skoodge, Invader Zim, "The Nightmare Begins"
"Janeway was not the type of girl to jump on the nearest chair and shriek when faced by a giant rat, but she could not deny a feeling of wrongness, of alienation — the instinctive psychological rejection of a creature that was in the form and manner of a Man, yet was not."
"The Skaven? Aye, they are very real, as real as the stones beneath your feet. Filthy rat-men. A treacherous, conniving race without morality, conscience or honour. They burrow through the darkness, awaiting the End Times when they intend to rise and destroy us all — that is, if they don't kill one another first. No Karak bears a Book of Grudges that doesn't have many a line devoted to those foul creatures. They fight with poison and plague, with treachery and malice. So why have you never heard of them? Because truth is a commodity you Humans seldom traffic in. Sigmar's Hounds, your witch hunters, they know of the Skaven. So why do they not speak of them? Why would they tell you? What could you do about it? Can you imagine the panic that would arise among the members of your weak-willed race if they learned there were Chaos-spawned rat-men plotting their downfall, living under the cities of the Empire? The bravest of your kind deal with the Skaven the best they can, and the rest of you are gifted with ignorance."
— Thingrim Bradnisson, Dwarf Miner, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Old World Bestiary — A Compendium of Creatures Fair and Foul
0All decent folk find the common rat repulsive. Harbinger of disease, it scavenges on our waste-heaps and frightens our children. How immeasurably worse then is the Skaven — standing on its hindlegs in a foul parody of a human. Rats as tall as a man, and blessed with the most vile intellect and cunning. They are the dark side of our soul, come to destroy us for our sins."
— Albrecht of Nuln, Warhammer: Skaven Army Book (4th edition)
