Creativity Quote by Paul Kantner

“Maintain yourself and everything maintains itself around you” is the kind of plainspoken credo that sounds like a bumper sticker until you remember who’s saying it: Paul Kantner, a guy who helped soundtrack the Bay Area’s utopian ambitions and watched a lot of them curdle. Coming from a musician steeped in communal ideals, the line quietly flips the usual counterculture script. It’s not “drop out and the world will follow.” It’s closer to: if you don’t tend your own mind, body, and ethics, your communes, bands, and revolutions will rot from the inside.

The intent is practical, almost managerial. Kantner isn’t preaching self-care as indulgence; he’s arguing for self-maintenance as infrastructure. In a scene that idolized spontaneity and mistrusted institutions, “maintain” is a loaded verb: unsexy, repetitive, disciplined. It suggests that freedom isn’t a permanent state you achieve; it’s a system you keep running. The subtext is a warning to idealists: entropy is real. Relationships fray, groups splinter, egos metastasize, addictions creep in. The world doesn’t magically harmonize because you want it to.

Context matters: Jefferson Airplane and its extended universe lived the arc from 60s optimism to 70s fragmentation. Kantner saw how quickly collective dreams can be derailed by personal chaos. The line reads like wisdom earned after the amplifiers cool down: stabilize the core, and the “around you” - collaborators, communities, even art - has a chance to stabilize too. It’s radical responsibility dressed up as simplicity.