K. K. Steincke

Steincke was a Danish Social Democrat who served as Minister of Justice and Minister of Social Affairs and is remembered as a principal architect of Denmark’s early welfare state. Late in his career he wrote a multi-volume memoir, Ogsaa en Tilværelse; the fourth volume, Farvel og Tak (1948), contains the earliest instance of this joke that Quote Investigator has located. Steincke is the recorder, not the proven author — he presented the line as something said in parliament, with no attribution given.