  Assuming that the cosmological principle holds, Maartens, Ellis and Stoeger
(MES) recently constructed a detailed scheme linking anisotropies in the cosmic
background radiation (CMB) with anisotropies and inhomogeneities in the large
scale structure of the universe and showed how to place limits on those
anisotropies and inhomogeneities simply by using CMB quadrupole and octupole
limits. First we indicate and discuss the connection between the covariant
multipole moments of the temperature anisotropy used in the MES scheme and the
quadrupole and octupole results from COBE. Then we introduce those results into
the MES limit equations to obtain definite quantitative limits on the complete
set of cosmological measures of anisotropy and inhomogeneity.
  We find that all the anisotropy measures are less than 10^{-4} in the case of
those not affected by the expansion rate H, and less than 10^{-6} Mpc^{-1} in
the case of those which are. These results quantitatively demonstrate that the
observable universe is indeed close to Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker
(FLRW) on the largest scales, and can be adequately modelled by an almost-FLRW
model -- that is, the anisotropies and inhomogeneities characterizing the
observable universe on the largest scales are not too large to be considered
perturbations to FLRW.
