Amanda Reese: Name names, and come clean. You help yourself, and your union.
Sobotka: Help my union? For 25 years we've been dyin' slow down there. Dry dock's rustin', piers standin' empty. My friends and their kids like we got the cancer. No life-line got thrown all that time, nothin' from nobody, and now you wanna help us? Help me?

Beadie: World keeps turning.
Season 3

Brother Mouzone: [to Cheese, after shooting him] Pellets in plastic. Rat shot. What you need to be concerned about is what's seated in the chamber now: a copper-jacketed, hollow point 120-grain hot street load of my own creation. So you need to think for just a moment and ask yourself: what do I have to do before this man raise up his gun again?

Brother Mouzone: Lamar, where's my Harper's?
Lamar: Say wha'?
Brother Mouzone: Harper's. The new issue.
Lamar: You didn't say that one. You said The New Republic, and Atlantic, and a new somethin' else.
Brother Mouzone: I did not forget to tell you Harper's. Every week I tell you the same shit, and every week you forget half of what I say.

Bunk: A different look for our boy.
McNulty: Yeah, Perry Ellis, or something.
Bunk: Now, how would a just-rolled-out-of-bed-looking motherfucker like you, know the designer?
McNulty: [pauses] Okay, I'm guessing.
Bunk: It's a Joseph Abboud. He puts dark buttons instead of brass on his blazers. That's the Abboud signature.
McNulty: You know what they call a guy who pays that much attention to his clothes, don't you?
Bunk: Mm-hmm, a grown-up.

Bunk: Boy, them Greeks and those twisted-ass names.
McNulty: Man, back off the Greeks. They invented civilization.
Bunk: Yeah? Ass-fucking, too.

Bunk: Jimmy, the look on Jay Landsman's face, he nearly cried!
[McNulty, Freamon and Bunk all laugh]
Lester: And Rawls! All afternoon, he just stays in his office with the door closed.
McNulty: Careful, you're giving me an erection!

Bunk: The thing of it is, Lieutenant... Jimmy McNulty, when he ain't policing he's a picture postcard of a drunken, self-destructive fuck-up. And when he is policing... he's pretty much the same motherfucker. But on a good case, he runnin' in front of the pack. That's as close as the man comes to bein' right.

Carver: [about Herc, modeling sunglasses] His name is Head. Dick Head.

Cheese: You mean to tell me there's a west-side nigga that know how to sell shit without stickin' a pistol in a fiends face?
Bodie: Yeah dog, and you better get used it, 'cause ya'll ain't sellin shit, until we bone-ass dry!

Country: Yo, uh, String, why are you so down on the phone companies, man?
Stringer: While back, I took a stroll through the pit, I saw that kid we got running things down there, uh, Poot. Now, he got the cell phone I gave him for the business, right there on his hip. But, the nigga got another cell phone that only rang when the pussy called. Now, if this no-account nigga got two cell phones, how the fuck you gonna sell any more of them motherfuckers? That's market saturation.

D'Angelo Barksdale: The past is always with us. Where we come from, what we go through, how we go through it; all this shit matters. Like at the end of the book, ya' know, boats and tides and all. It's like you can change up, right, you can say you're somebody new, you can give yourself a whole new story. But, what came first is who you really are and what happened before is what really happened. It don't matter that some fool say he different 'cause the things that make you different is what you really do, what you really go through. Like, ya' know, all those books in his library. He frontin' with all them books, but if you pull one down off the shelf, none of the pages have ever been opened. He got all them books, and he hasn't read nearly one of them. Gatsby, he was who he was, and he did what he did. And 'cause he wasn't willing to get real with the story, that shit caught up to him.

D.C. Guy: [about D'Angelo's death] But did your man Avon even knew about it? [Stringer shakes his head] You on your own here huh?
Stringer: You right, it ain't none of your business. And if I were you, I wouldn't let a word of this mess end up in Avon's ear.
D.C. Guy: Baltimore nigga's off the hook, I swear. All ya'll.

Daniels: [about McNulty] You ever see how a dog gets when he smells a bone buried in the yard?
Rawls: Yeah, and I seen one take a shit on my carpet, too. And don't give me that he's-got-that-fire-in-the-belly garbage, either. The answer is no.

Daniels: [to Major Valchek] I'll tell you the truth Major. Everyone who saw the punch wrote on it. And they've all got Prez throwing the punch, no question. They've also got you addressing a subordinate officer as uh, what was it? A shit-bird?
Valchek: Fuck you. This is the Baltimore Police Department, not the Roland Park Ladies Tea.