My previous background is heavily rooted in Classical Chinese philosophy, and the phrase struck me as very strange to be coming from Confucius, so I did a bit of digging.

The formulation of the phrase which I'm seeing written in Chinese is also mostly snowing up on NWO sites. Why Chinese people care about 9/11 being an inside job is beyond me, but that's where it's coming up. In addition, it's not being written in the language Confucius wrote; It's always written in modern Mandarin. This is a red flag since usually, when people are quoting Confucius in Chinese sources or on Chinese sites, they'll include the original phrasing, and also link to where in Confucius' writings it's coming from. I also see no such citation in any of these sources.

I also went through the Analects and was unable to find anything that would match this phrase. Nothing. I expanded my search and still came up empty. You can do a bit of digging yourself if you're interested by going to http://ctext.org/.

Basically, everything is pointing to the Confucius attribution as being BS. It's incredibly unlikely he ever wrote such a thing. And if he had, it would take all of 10 minutes to find out exactly where it was written.

So then you final question was where would this have come from. The answer is either it's from no one in particular and it just got attributed to Confucius because that's a name people will have heard of, or it was said by someone else entirely and then was mis-attributed either by mistake or to make it sound more legit.

tl:dr; Incredibly unlikely Confucius ever said such a thing.

I'm not sure who said it, but it wasn't Confucius, unless the translator was REALLY bad. Confucius was more enamored of the idea that it was the benevolent man (which is its own mess) would act as a beacon of morality to guide the lesser people along the Way. So in a sense, you could maybe extrapolate the above quote from Confucius, or possibly from his thoughts on omens, but not in the sense the r/Conspiracy crew probably means it.