John S. Bell quote: “FOR ALL PRACTICAL PURPOSES = FAPP.”

“ORDINARY QUANTUM MECHANICS (as far as I know) IS JUST FINE FOR ALL PRACTICAL PURPOSES.”

John S. Bell (1928–1990) Northern Irish physicist

Against 'measurement' (1990)
Context: I agree with them about that: ORDINARY QUANTUM MECHANICS (as far as I know) IS JUST FINE FOR ALL PRACTICAL PURPOSES. Even when I begin by insisting on this myself, and in capital letters, it is likely to be insisted on repeatedly in the course of the discussion. So it is convenient to have an abbreviation for the last phrase: FOR ALL PRACTICAL PURPOSES = FAPP.

“My life is over, for all practical purposes. I no longer have enough money to keep a women.”

Charles Portis book True Grit

Emmett, from Gringos
True Grit (1968)

“Roger tried to find out all about her: he wanted, in one brief hour, to make up for a lifetime of non-acquaintance, a lifetime for all practical purposes wasted.”

Jack Vance book Space Opera

Source: Space Opera (1965), Chapter 4 (p. 30)

“All the migrations postulated by Renfrew ultimately stem from a single catalyst: the crossing of Anatolian farmers into Greece… For all practical purposes, Renfrew’s hypothesis disregards Tocharian and Indo-Iranian.”

Colin Renfrew (1937) British archaeologist

Heaven, Heroes and Happiness: The Indo-European Roots of Western Ideology by Shan M.M. Winn, University Press of America, Lanham-New York-London, 1995. Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

“Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

Act I
Buchanan Dying (1974)
Context: Facts are generally overesteemed. For most practical purposes, a thing is what men think it is. When they judged the earth flat, it was flat. As long as men thought slavery tolerable, tolerable it was. We live down here among shadows, shadows among shadows.