A Toast to the Simple, Ordinary, Modest People

A quote from Joseph Stalin at the beginning of the book Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization by Stephen Kotkin:

I propose a toast to simple, ordinary, modest people, to the "little cogs" who keep our great state machine in motion. . . . No one writes about them, they have no high titles and few offices, but they are the people who maintain us. . . . I drink to the health of these people.