There is a common misquotation of Plato, which recently came up yet again on Twitter:
One of [the] penalties of refusing to participate in politics is you end up governed by your inferiors.
Or, worse:
The price paid by good men for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
This is a fake Plato quote. Plato did say something kind of like this, but there's a really major difference.
Allan Bloom's precise translation says:
and the greatest of penalties is being ruled by a worse man if one is not willing to rule oneself.
(You could misread this as "if one is not willing to control oneself", but the Greek text doesn't admit that reading; it clearly means "is not willing, oneself, to rule.".)
You can find both versions of this fake quote at misquote-laundering sites like Brainyquote.
You can also find this quote in misquote-laundering web sites and publications similarly unconcerned with correctness, such as those by the Brookings Institution.
The real quote in context, from Benjamin Jowett's loose translation, is as follows:
Wherefore necessity must be laid upon them, and they must be induced to serve from the fear of punishment. And this, as I imagine, is the reason why the forwardness to take office, instead of waiting to be compelled, has been deemed dishonourable. Now the worst part of the punishment is that he who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself. And the fear of this, as I conceive, induces the good to take office, not because they would, but because they cannot help --not under the idea that they are going to have any benefit or enjoyment themselves, but as a necessity, and because they are not able to commit the task of ruling to any one who is better than themselves, or indeed as good.
This is Socrates speaking to Glaucon about three-quarters of the way through Book I of the Republic, in what's usually known as section 347c. You will note the very large difference between "refuses to rule" and "refuses to participate in politics"; anyone who endorses a candidate, after all, is participating in politics, but only the leader of the government rules.
The relevant phrase in the Classic Greek original reads:
τῆς δὲ ζημίας μεγίστη τὸ ὑπὸ πονηροτέρου ἄρχεσθαι, ἐὰν μὴ αὐτὸς ἐθέλῃ ἄρχειν·
(Perseus has put parallel texts online.)
WikiQuote, the free world's answer to profiteering falsehood sites like BrainyQuote, has several paragraphs of discussion about this misquotation.
At one point I misremembered Plato as saying that this was the penalty for "not being the tyrant", but that's going too far to the other extreme, to the extent of inaccuracy. The Republic talks about several different forms of government, including absolute power by one person (the "tyrant", but without the modern derogatory connotation), and there's no indication that Plato is talking specifically about seizing absolute power; ἄρχειν just means "to lead", in a very general sense, but here referring specifically to governing.
But ἄρχειν definitely does not mean just "to not be indifferent to public affairs" or "to participate in politics".
The older version of the falsified quote seems to be this:
The price paid by good men for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
I have a vague memory that this was invented by an American political group in the mid-20th Century. The phrase "indifference to public affairs" seems to have been stolen from Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism, near the middle of the book, which more or less directly contradicts the fake Plato quote:
Indifference to public affairs, neutrality on political issues, are in themselves no sufficient cause for the rise of totalitarian movements. The competitive and acquisitive society of the bourgeoisie had produced apathy and even hostility toward public life not only, and not even primarily, in the social strata which were exploited and excluded from active participation in the rule of the country, but first of all in its own class.