Especially around Valentine's Day, it's easy to find advice about sustaining a successful marriage, with suggestions for 'date nights' and romantic dinners for two. But as we spend more and more of our lives outside marriage, it's equally important to cultivate the skills of successful singlehood.

Labeling people single parents, for example, when they may in fact be co-parenting - either with an unmarried other parent in the home or with an ex-spouse in a joint custody situation - stigmatizes their children as the products of 'single parenthood' and makes the uncounted parent invisible to society.

Throughout history, people with few educational or economic resources and little bargaining power have often looked to authoritarian, ruthless people to stand up for them.

Investing in living-wage jobs and reducing the inequities between local school districts would give young people more, not less, incentive to postpone childbearing and more possibilities for independence.

Giving married women an independent legal existence did not destroy heterosexual marriage. And allowing husbands and wives to construct their marriages around reciprocal duties and negotiated roles - where a wife can choose to be the main breadwinner and a husband can stay home with the children - was an immense boon to many couples.

Contrary to myth, 'The Feminine Mystique' and feminism did not represent the beginning of the decline of the stay-at-home mother but a turning point that led to much stronger legal rights and 'working conditions' for her.

A primary motivation for introducing no-fault divorce was, in fact, to reduce perjury in the legal system.

Unilateral divorce has decreased the bargaining power of the person who wants the marriage to last and has not engaged in behavior that meets the legal definition of fault. On the other hand, it has increased the bargaining power of the person who is willing to leave.

Whatever their relative valuation of the single and married states, most societies in history made sharp distinctions between those who married and those who remained single: They were seen as mutually exclusive ways of life, with different legal rights and social obligations.

It no longer makes sense to see singlehood and marriage as two distinct and stable social categories that should be accorded different legal rights and social esteem.

Valentine's Day is a perfect time to reject the idea that the ideal man is taller, richer, more knowledgeable, more renowned, or more powerful.

Usually, Valentine's Day comes and goes with just a day or two of news media attention to courtship and marriage.

The notion that marriage is an impediment to commitments to the larger community is a long-standing one - and one reason early Christians did not place the institution at the top of their moral hierarchy, complaining that married couples cared more about pleasing each other than doing the Lord's work.

Marriage can provide a bounty of emotional, practical, and financial support. But finding the right mate is no substitute for having friends and other interests.

Marriage is no longer the main way in which societies regulate sexuality and parenting or organize the division of labor between men and women.

In my work as a historian and in my relationships as a friend, teacher, wife, and mother, I have come to think that the most useful way to understand the past and make it work for you is to look at the trade-offs and contradictions that, however deeply buried, can be uncovered in every memory, good or bad.

Couples need time alone to renew their relationship. They also need to sustain supportive networks of friends and family.

When liberals dismiss all Trump supporters as racists, this only fuels their anger.

The rules of friendship are tacit, unconscious; they are not rational. In business, though, you have to think rationally.

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.

I think that a failure of statistical thinking is the major intellectual shortcoming of our universities, journalism and intellectual culture.

Northeastern and most coastal states will vote for the candidate who is more closely aligned with international cooperation and engagement, secularism and science, gun control, individual freedom in culture and sexuality, and a greater role for the government in protecting the environment and ensuring economic equality.

A hostility to modernity is shared by ideologies that have nothing else in common - a nostalgia for moral clarity, small-town intimacy, family values, primitive communism, ecological sustainability, communitarian solidarity, or harmonies with the rhythms of nature.

As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.

The strongest argument against totalitarianism may be a recognition of a universal human nature; that all humans have innate desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The doctrine of the blank slate... is a totalitarian's dream.

There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts - decoration of surfaces and bodies - appears to be a human universal.

A decent government with an effective, but not gratuitously violent, police force and a fair court system are essential. This deters and incapacitates psychopaths, bullies and hotheads - and if it earns the confidence of the people, they don't have to become violent in self-defence.

It's misleading to essentialize an entire society as if it were a single mind.

Everywhere you look for comparisons of life under anarchy and life under government, life under government is less violent.

Jews are known for many things, but strength, swiftness, and agility are not among them. There is one trait, as controversial as it is familiar, for which Jews are above all known, and that is shrewdness in business.

Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world.

When people talk, they lay lines on each other, do a lot of role playing, sidestep, shilly-shally and engage in all manner of vagueness and innuendo. We do this and expect others to do it, yet at the same time we profess to long for the plain truth, for people to say what they mean, simple as that. Such hypocrisy is a human universal.

Human nature is complex. Even if we do have inclinations toward violence, we also have inclination to empathy, to cooperation, to self-control.

My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours, mayhem and rioting broke out and the Mounties had to be called in to restore order. It instilled in me that one's convictions can be subjected to empirical test.

Whenever you speak to someone, you are presuming the two of you have a certain degree of familiarity - which your words might alter. So every sentence has to do two things at once: convey a message and continue to negotiate that relationship.

Semantics is about the relation of words to thoughts, but it also about the relation of words to other human concerns. Semantics is about the relation of words to reality - the way that speakers commit themselves to a shared understanding of the truth, and the way their thoughts are anchored to things and situations in the world.

America had, for one thing, lived in anarchy for - until much more recently than Europe. We had the Wild West, where the cliche of the cowboy movies was the nearest sheriff is 90 miles away, and so you had to pack a gun and defend yourself.

There has to be innate circuitry that does the learning, that creates the culture, that acquires the culture, and that responds to socialization.

Most wars are not fought over shortages of resources such as food and water, but rather over conquest, revenge, and ideology.

I would be willing to do almost anything to make Art happy. I care about our friendship. The only thing I won't do is change the essence of my work.

There's something about the sound of a train that's very romantic and nostalgic and hopeful.

As long as you have capital punishment there is no guarantee that innocent people won't be put to death.

People often called us perfectionists, but we were not looking for perfection. We were looking for some kind of magic in the music.

Music is forever; music should grow and mature with you, following you right on up until you die.

Improvisation is too good to leave to chance.

I was eating in a Chinese restaurant downtown. There was a dish called Mother and Child Reunion. It's chicken and eggs. And I said, I gotta use that one.

I don't consider myself to be a major talent, so the only solace I can take is to hope I'm growing.

Faith is an island in the setting sun, But proof is the bottom line for everyone.

If you can get humor and seriousness at the same time, you've created a special little thing, and that's what I'm looking for, because if you get pompous, you lose everything.

We'll have a sales leader go run engineering. A lawyer go run business development. A business development leader go run our consumer operations. We're going to train a generalist group of leaders who know how to learn and operate in collaboration teamwork. I think that's the future of leadership.