How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
It wasn't the dying. He had seen men die all his life, and death was the luck of the chance, the price you eventually paid. What was worse was the stupidity. The appalling sick stupidity that was so bad you thought sometimes you would go suddenly, violently, completely insane just having to watch it. (1.3.84)
Buford, the Union General who holds back the Confederates while the rest of the Army arrives, sees stupidity as being worse than death—probably because stupidity leads to such totally pointless deaths. It's true that death is a price everyone needs to pay—but do they have to pay it for nothing, for some commander's bonehead mistakes? Now that's scary.
Quote #2
Piled-up bodies in front of you to catch the bullets, using the dead for a shield; remember the sound? Of bullets in dead bodies? Like a shot into a rotten leg, a wet thick leg. All a man is: wet leg of blood. Remember the flap of a torn curtain in a blasted window, fragment whispering in that awful breeze: forever, never, forever. (2.4.20)
Joshua Chamberlain is remembering the Battle of Fredericksburg, which was kind of like the Union Army's version of Pickett's Charge: they were slaughtered as they charged up a hill toward the Confederates. In Chamberlain's eyes, this seems to make human life less valuable: people start to seem just like pieces of meat.
Quote #3
Once Chamberlain had a speech memorized from Shakespeare and gave it proudly, the old man listening but not looking, and Chamberlain remembered it still, 'What a piece of work is man… in action how like an angel!' And the old man, grinning, had scratched his head and then said stiffly, 'Well, boy, if he's an angel, he's sure a murderin' angel.' And Chamberlain had gone on to school to make an oration on the subject: Man, the Killer Angel. And when the old man heard about it he was very proud, and Chamberlain felt very good remembering it. (2.4.28)
Even though human beings are supposed to be all that and a bag of vintage 1865 potato chips—you know, the most advanced species on earth—they're capable of committing horrible acts, of wreaking havoc and bloodshed all over the globe. This is the meaning behind the title The Killer Angels.