He was a Confucian, with a rather dark bent. He was pessimistic about human nature.
It looks like this quote is legit, or at least widely attributed to him, but "heaven" in ancient Chinese thought is not what most Westerners tend to think of it as. It's "that which makes things as they are", so at best, an impersonal Force type of thing.
Even adjusting for that, though, it does sound very secular humanist / atheistic, I agree.
How does an Atheist refer to BCE ?
@Graham88 thanks, good job im not an Aztec, or we would all have died in 2012, but perhaps they got their calendar wrong ?
Cool quote, if authentic. It sounds suspiciously modern, however.